Everything is a little smoother in 2002’s HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS. The young actors give more assured performances; Steve Kloves’ script, having gotten so much exposition out of its way in Sorcerer’s Stone, is faster and more character-based; the camerawork (by Roger Pratt instead of John Seale) is more fluid; […]
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 […]
> Here are capsule summaries of all this year’s SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival reviews, arranged more or less in order of preference. Click on each title for the full review, and the complete list of all the reviews is here. SHAME: Audiences who go to the new film by Steve McQueen (not that one) for […]
30 MINUTES OR LESS – Watch It At Home: Doesn’t Deliver The frustration of 30 MINUTES OR LESS is that of all the R-rated comedies this summer, it was the one with the most original premise and promising credentials: direction by Ruben Fleischer, the man behind the surprisingly smart and funny hit Zombieland, […]
THE IDES OF MARCH: Watch It At Home – An Excellent Play Becomes a Merely Good Movie The Ides of March, one of the most eagerly awaited of this year’s festival crop, is more entertaining than it is good. Oddly both low-key and melodramatic, claptrap and high-minded drama, it represents a series […]
> Watch It At Home; The thrills are so postmodern, they don’t seem to be happening in the theater. When the original Scream arrived in 1996, the slaughtering-the-teenagers genre was already old enough to drive; the first Friday the 13th had opened more than 16 years before. The conventions of the form were as well-worn […]
> DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions. On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you’ve chosen. If you do it right, you have […]
> Chris Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets were well-crafted, entertaining movies, but Alfonso Cuaron’s 2004 HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN was the first real Potter film. It’s also the least successful financially (if you think $795M worldwide is something to complain about). This may be because it’s burdened by the most […]