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 […]

> The magically moving portraits are pulled off the walls of Hogwarts in 2007’s HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, and the colors have started draining from the Potter universe.  Gone are the lush visuals of Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire; the palette of Slawomir Idziak’s photography (his films include Kieslowski’s […]

> 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 […]

    THE THREE MUSKETEERS:  Not At Any Price – All For None and None For All   If the last couple of Pirates of the Caribbean movies and the current Sherlock Holmes franchise had a really nasty, dirty weekend together in Atlantic City, and 9 months later one of them (I’m not saying which) […]

    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 […]

  Airing on Cinemax:  At Home In Your Home With the failure of THE INFORMANT! at the box-office in 2009 (it grossed around $41M worldwide), Steven Soderbergh seemed to reach a crossroads in his career. Informantfollowed the even bigger financial flop of his ambitious 2-part Che, and soon afterward he announced his intention to retire […]

  ZOOKEEPER – Not Even For Free:  Isn’t There An ASPCA For Audiences?   Let’s put off talking about ZOOKEEPER–it’s terrible, for those with no time to spare–by mentioning the trailer for Adam Sandler’s upcoming Jack & Jill that’s attached to it (both movies are produced by Sandler’s production company Happy Madison and released by […]

> One of the enduring questions of Madonna’s illustrious quarter-century career is how someone so brilliant in managing every other facet of her persona has consistently made such terrible decisions when it comes to movies.  It’s the one medium where she’s never succeeded, and even when she’s occasionally done something right, she instantly follows it […]