ANONYMOUS:  Watch It At Home – The Bard Was A Beard, Claims Wheezy Expose   ANONYMOUS is history tailored for the 1%. Although screenwriter John Orloff and director Roland Emmerich have swirled it into a complicated tangle of conspiracies and scandals, the idea at the center of Anonymous is simple enough (uh, Spoiler Alert):  […]

  Worth a ticket.   It’s a little mysterious that Michael Connelly’s trim, twisty crime novels have so rarely hit the screen. Perhaps it was the tepid reception received by Blood Work in 2002, unfortunately one of Clint Eastwood’s more dismal films of the last decade. Or just the usual horror stories of movie industry […]

  HAPPY FEET TWO:  Watch It At Home – Not So Happy This Time   Most sequels, by and large, exist only because an earlier movie made lots of money–that’s just a fact.  But sequels often at least try to find some justification beyond that, even if it’s only a commitment to do the same […]

> For everyone journeying to the multiplex this long weekend, some reviews to click on: THE TREE OF LIFE:  An often stupendous achievement that courts ridicule–and sometimes earns it. THE HANGOVER PART II:  It wasn’t broke, they didn’t fix it. KUNG FU PANDA 2:  This franchise has been working out. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: A tasty […]

    STAR WARS EPISODE I:  THE PHANTOM MENACE 3D, to give it its fully identifying title, has the distinction of being the most successful movie ever made that is generally agreed to be terrible.  Over $900M in tickets have been sold for Phantom Menace since its opening in 1999 (that number will go over […]

    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 […]

> If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be “dynamic.”  Or “kinetic.”  Or, well, “exciting.”  Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret. Which is why […]

> Today, 3 films from first-time directors: Caroline Bottaro’s marvelous QUEEN TO PLAY is, in a sense, a sports movie.  We have the out-of-nowhere player whose newly-discovered talent shakes up her whole life, the wise and somewhat eccentric mentor, even the climactic competition.  The game here, though, is chess, and the film (in French, with […]