LARRY CROWNE:  Watch It At Home – Giant Stars/Tiny Ambitions   Allow me to play Nostradamus for a moment.  the day will come–and it’s not far off–when you’ll be sitting in front of your TV set, remote in hand (or maybe you’ll be looking at your online streaming site, the vision is a little […]

> Watch It At Home; Dreary Franchise Moviemaking. In the 137 minutes of Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides, the 4th installment in Disney’s hugely successful franchise (and yes, you have to sit through all 10 minutes of end credits for a not-crucial coda scene), there is exactly one inspired idea.  About halfway through, […]

> Worth a ticket. The director and writer of Saw, James Wan and Leigh Whannell, combine again to bring us–hey, where are you going?  No, seriously:  don’t run away.  Leaving aside that Saw is rather unfairly maligned (before it became the poster child for “torture porn” and a dumb sequel machine for Lionsgate, the original […]

YOUNG ADULT: Worth A Ticket – Theron + Oswalt = The Real Thing   Charlize Theron plays the hell out of her character Mavis Gary in the new YOUNG ADULT.  Theron has had a curious Hollywood career, with the usual big-budget flops (remember Aeon Flux?) mixed with a clearly wholehearted commitment to difficult, independent projects […]

> 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 […]

      GONE:  Not Even For Free – Gone?  Not Soon Enough   When was the last time you saw a non-ironic, non-parody movie where someone was sneaking around in a room belonging to a possible villain, searching in almost total silence for evidence in the recesses of a dark closet, when–literally!–a cat came […]

> Welcome to SHOWBUZZDAILY’s coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival, where the reviews will be as plentiful as we can cram into a week. TIFF started things off on a less-than-festive note with Werner Herzog’s documentary “Into the Abyss,” The title isn’t kidding: this is the story of a meaninglessly brutal triple murder committed […]

  PUNCTURE:  Worth A Ticket – A Bracingly Dark Ride   No one is going to see PUNCTURE in theaters, and that’s a shame, because unaccountably, it’s one of the best pictures around.  “Unaccountably,” because this is a film that doesn’t even seem to know there’s a radar to fly below:  although it contains an […]