REAL STEEL:  Watch It At Home – The Word is “Clunky”   REAL STEEL wants to be loved so much, it practically walks the audience members to their cars and offers to give them all a lift home.  And yet, the packed house I saw it with could only offer the movie a smattering of […]

  WAR HORSE:  Watch It At Home –  Spielberg’s Beautiful Muzak   Earlier this year, audiences were presented with Super 8, J. J. Abrams’s pastiche of Steven Spielberg’s classic sci-fi adventures from the 1970s and 80s (Spielberg was a producer on the project).  Now with WAR HORSE, we have Spielberg’s own pastiche:  of John Ford, […]

> Worth A Ticket; An often stupendous achievement that courts ridicule–and sometimes earns it. Terrence Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE is at once the filmmaker’s most emotionally grounded and dizzyingly ambitious film, his most relatable and esoteric piece of work.  In a sense it’s the definitive Malick film, the one that explores his chosen themes […]

    ANOTHER EARTH – Worth A Ticket:  Tiny Story With Big Ambitions   For ANOTHER EARTH, the Sundance Film Festival went exactly the way it’s supposed to.  The low-key picture was made on a miniscule budget (a few hundred thousand dollars) by complete unknowns, director/cinematographer/editor/co-writer/co-producer Mike Cahill and star/co-writer/co-producer Brit Marling, with far less […]

> Oren Moverman’s first film as a director, The Messenger, was a beautifully contained, emotionally detailed story about soldiers assigned to deliver tragic news to the families of the deceased.  In his new film RAMPART, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Moverman is more ambitious and, unfortunately, a victim of the sophomore jinx. This […]

    J. EDGAR:  Watch It At Home – Brokeback Hoover   It’s a little unexpected that of all the films Clint Eastwood has directed, his new biography J. EDGAR most resembles The Bridges of Madison County.  Measured and mournful, the film, which opened the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles last night and opens […]

> Watch It At Home:  Much sadness, little insight. BEAUTIFUL BOY is less interesting than you’d think it would be.  The premise is certainly arresting:  Shawn Ku’s first film (written with Michael Armbruster) tells the story of the aftermath of a school massacre, from the viewpoint of the parents of the teen who shot down […]

    STRAW DOGS:  Watch It At Home – Pointless In Every Way   Forget about the artistic comparisons, the insult to film history, and the lack of respect to a great filmmaker no longer with us.  There’s not even a commercial reason to remake Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 STRAW DOGS.  The title is virtually valueless […]