> 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 […]

> 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 […]

> Watch It At Home:  Scrupulously accurate, to a fault. In an era that so recently gave us “The Kennedys,” possibly the worst piece of pop culture history ever produced for American television, it seems downright rude to criticize Robert Redford’s new film THE CONSPIRATOR for sticking to the facts.  Accuracy and drama, however, are […]

> Amid multiplying online reports, spearheaded by New York Magazine’s Vulture site, that Paramount’s SUPER 8 is tracking for a very soft opening this weekend at the box-office, the studio has decided to launch a “secret” (by which I mean “highly publicized“) pre-opening day:  the movie will now screen on Thursday in about 325 theaters […]

> EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE:  Worth A Ticket –  Earns Its Tears If EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE accomplishes nothing else–and it actually accomplishes quite a bit–it’s served to let us know exactly where the third rail of current American popular culture is located.  It’s not every day that the august NY Times informs […]

> Worth A Ticket:  A teen movie unlike any other. Richard Ayoade’s emotionally rich SUBMARINE is shaping up as one of the sadder stories of the indie boxoffice season.   It was greeted rapturously at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2010, and the US distribution rights were acquired by Harvey Weinstein; Ben Stiller signed […]

  It’s been 23 years since the pre-Christopher Nolan version of the Batman franchise launched into the boxoffice stratosphere, and a lot has changed in the movie landscape.  (1989 is so long ago that it was a topical gag in the movie to cast Gotham City’s Mayor with an actor who looked like New York’s […]

> Worth a Ticket. HANNA may be the first movie not based on a graphic novel to feel like it is.  Written by Seth Lochhead and David Farr (the first film for both) and directed by Joe Wright, it has the feel of a film conceived in visual rather than dramatic terms, more concerned with […]