> ARTHUR CHRISTMAS: Worth A Ticket – Yuletime Tidings With the Aardman Touch As the Thanksgiving holiday box-office has started to be counted, it’s become fairly clear that there isn’t much of an audience, at least in the US, for ARTHUR CHRISTMAS. Which is too bad, because it happens to be one of the warmest […]

> On Homevideo:  See It On Any Screen One of the great things about growing up in New York during the 1970s was experiencing the films of Sidney Lumet, who died today at the age of 86.  Lumet had been making great pictures since the 1950s; his first film–his first film–was 12 Angry Men, and […]

>   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 […]

  IN TIME:  Watch It At Home – The Clock Never Really Starts Ticking   Andrew Niccol wants to be a populist moviemaker of ideas, but he just doesn’t have the knack.  Niccol’s ideas are genuinely impressive:  he’s the man who wrote The Truman Show and Gattaca, and less successfully, S1mOne and Lord of War.  […]

    RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Worth A Ticket:  Simian Power   Although it’s positioned as the last big adventure epic of the summer, for most of its length Rupert Wyatt’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES isn’t really an action movie.  Somewhat surprisingly, while it establishes an alternative mythology […]

> If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he’d had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler’s concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets […]

  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):  […]

> Watch It At Home. Were the executives at Warner Bros so desperate to be in business with Russell Brand that they huddled together in a conference room one day, frantically going through their library titles in search of alcoholic lead roles he could play?  (“Days of Wine and Roses… a little dark.  Clean and […]