> SOURCE CODE is this weekend’s major live-action opening, so here’s a look at some recent work by its star Jake Gyllenhaal and its director Duncan Jones. Gyllenhaal has had a curious Hollywood career thus far, and PRINCE OF PERSIA:  THE SANDS OF TIME, far from his most auspicious moment, was his first pre-Source Code […]

    TOWER HEIST:  Watch It At Home – Hardly Luxury-Class   There may never have been a director more proud of being a hack than Brett Ratner.  In a recent NY Times profile, Ratner boasts (when he’s not going on about his friendship with Roman Polanski, because yeah, there’s a social relationship you’d want […]

> When the announcement was made that Warner Bros would split HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS into 2 full-length movies, there was a certain amount of cynicism about studio greed–and, indeed, why not pick up an extra billion or so if the opportunity arises?  But really, J.K. Rowling’s novels have all been stuffed so […]

> Reviews of some of the more prominent movies in theatres right now: X-MEN:  FIRST CLASS MIDNIGHT IN PARIS THE HANGOVER PART II KUNG FU PANDA 2 THE TREE OF LIFE

> THE CHANGE UP – Watch It At Home:  Cliches with Dirty Words Are Still Cliches There have been plenty of R-rated comedies this summer–a bumper crop, really–but none more fully committed to raunch than THE CHANGE-UP.  The script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (they wrote The Hangover, but also Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) […]

> Gus Van Sant has been making movies for 25 years, but Restless–apart from its technical polish–feels like the work of a Sundance newcomer. And one who’s been reading too much Salinger, while meanwhile wearing out his DVD of Harold and Maude. Restless is way beyond twee; its mega-tweeness is like a Transformers movie compared […]

  COWBOYS & ALIENS – Watch It At Home:  Genre Mash-Up Zaps Itself In the Foot   It’s admirable, in a way, that for much of its length, COWBOYS AND ALIENS is willing to be more of a western than a scifi extravaganza, even though scifi is a safer commercial bet.  The problem is that […]

> 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 […]