MAGIC MIKE:  Worth A Ticket – Soderbergh Again Earns His Crumpled Dollars   Although he hasn’t appeared in any of the year’s giant action blockbusters (GI Joe 2, probably not that giant anyway, was postponed to next year), 2012 could well be remembered as the year of Channing Tatum.  He’s had 3 major hits in […]

  GANGSTER SQUAD – Watch It At Home – Snappy, Violent and Completely Vacuous Watching the new GANGSTER SQUAD is a bit like checking into one of those giant Vegas theme park hotels and expecting to find yourself in the real Rome, Venice or Paris:  the place is luxurious, but utterly fake.  The director Ruben […]

THAT’S MY BOY:  Not Even For Free – Low-Rent Even For Sandler   THAT’S MY BOY is 116 minutes long.  I mention that up front because, for those of us who consider time spent watching Adam Sandler movies to be akin to a prison term, there’s a constitutional right of due process to let you […]

LOLA VERSUS:  Watch It At Home – An Unmemorable Woman   LOLA VERSUS‘ ambition is pretty clear:  it wants to be the 2012 version of Paul Mazursky’s 1978 comedy-drama AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, which is to say covering all the bases except the “married” part.  We meet Lola (Greta Gerwig) on her 29th birthday, and she […]

  42:  Watch It At Home – The Hallmark Baseball Hall of Fame It may well be that 42 is the Jackie Robinson movie audiences want.  It’s a straightforward, handsomely-produced, inspirational telling of a genuinely uplifting story, the 1946-47 baseball seasons when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) broke the color line in American baseball, first in the […]

  NEED FOR SPEED:  Watch It At Home – Not Enough Fuel If there was ever a movie that didn’t need to be over 2 hours long, the relatively unpretentious NEED FOR SPEED was it.  Action movies these days too often feel like they have to be epics, loaded with backstory and climactic showdowns that […]

  HER:  Buy A Ticket – Tetrabytes of Love From Spike Jonze HER, which was presented at the AFI Film Festival before opening in theatres next month, is the first film Spike Jonze has directed from his own original script, and although its inventiveness recalls Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., the projects on which he collaborated […]

  TO THE WONDER:  Malick Twirls and Twirls and Doesn’t Get Anywhere Terrence Malick’s last film The Tree of Life was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture; his new TO THE WONDER is receiving only a token theatrical release, with the bulk of its distribution through video-on-demand.  That’s a sign of the times, […]