OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL:  Watch It At Home – Not All Yellow Brick Roads Are Golden The digital landscapes in Sam Raimi’s prequel OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL are gorgeous:  eye-poppingly colorful, and crammed with beautiful, intricate detail.  There’s also a flying, talking monkey and a living china doll, both generated in the […]

  TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

  TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Not Even For Free – Hollywood’s Blockbuster Mentality To the Max Here are just a few of the epic movies with running times shorter than the 165 minutes of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Apocalypse Now, Avatar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Bridge On the River Kwai, Boogie Nights and Empire […]

> Sundance changed the way it kicks things off this year. Instead of a single high-profile Opening Night Film (which has almost always turned out to be a disappointment), the festival screened several smaller films. For those of us who arrived before the madness begins in earnest tomorrow, there was the chance to get Wait […]

    THE LORAX:  Not Even For Free – A Seussian Mess   It may not be pretty, but surely it’s true–Credit must go where credit is due.  In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just […]

THE WATCH:  Not At Any Price – Do the Stars a Favor:  Don’t Watch Some terrible movies surprise and disappoint, but you could see THE WATCH coming for weeks.  The increasingly desperate marketing campaign told the story–it’s a buddy comedy!  it’s a sci-fi comedy!  it’s a buddy comedy and a sci-fi comedy!–as did the panicky […]

  THE GUILT TRIP:  Watch It At Home – Maybe If the Ride Were Bumpier, It Would Be More Interesting The odd thing about THE GUILT TRIP is that it doesn’t especially cater either to fans of Barbra Streisand (who would probably prefer a more over-the-top, diva-like experience, not to mention some singing) or those of Seth […]

  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, […]