THE BIG YEAR:  Watch It At Home – Very Small Pleasures   THE BIG YEAR is an amiable, good-natured comedy that’s so insubstantial it seems to fly out of your memory even as you’re watching it.  If it had been a low-budgeted indie that turned up at a film festival, it might have felt […]

> Worth A Ticket:  A teen movie unlike any other. Richard Ayoade’s emotionally rich SUBMARINE is shaping up as one of the sadder stories of the indie boxoffice season.   It was greeted rapturously at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2010, and the US distribution rights were acquired by Harvey Weinstein; Ben Stiller signed […]

>   Not At Any Price:  Phony As A 3-Dollar Bill THE ART OF GETTING BY (then called “Homework”) stood out at Sundance like an unsore thumb.  In the midst of high-quality, serious films that were at least trying to be about something (several of which will be opening later this summer), Art Of Getting […]

  Watch it at home.   The deadliest weapon unleashed in BATTLE LOS ANGELES is its barrage of war-movie cliches. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but there’s this rag-tag group of Marines, led by a hard-bitten veteran, that has to go into enemy territory to rescue some civilians before friendly forces bomb the […]

    Airing on TCM March 24 and April 10:  See It On Any Screen.   The legacy of the late Elizabeth Taylor arises at least as much from her stature as one of the great, iconic Hollywood movie stars (and the prototypical tabloid goddess) as on the breadth of her acting skills.  But she […]

  SARAH’S KEY – Watch It At Home:  Misses a Difficult Mark     There may be no cinematic minefield more dangerous for filmmakers than the Holocaust.  For films entering that difficult territory, the choices of tone, approach and imagery may not just be called into question, but outright offend audiences, and viewers have very […]

  ZOOKEEPER – Not Even For Free:  Isn’t There An ASPCA For Audiences?   Let’s put off talking about ZOOKEEPER–it’s terrible, for those with no time to spare–by mentioning the trailer for Adam Sandler’s upcoming Jack & Jill that’s attached to it (both movies are produced by Sandler’s production company Happy Madison and released by […]

 Not At Any Price:  “Art” More Than Art   The name Monte Hellman doesn’t mean much to the vast majority of moviegoers, but Hellman is among the cultiest of American cult directors.  He came up the Roger Corman path in the 1960s with Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper (his films from that era include The […]