A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST:  Not Even For Free – They Don’t Include “Die Laughing” Seth MacFarlane, out from behind his high-concept animated and fantasy premises, has a surprisingly retro, even conservative sense of humor.  For all the many, many four-letter words in A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, and […]

> Pawel Pawlikowski is a filmmaker whose name deserves to be better known: his films Last Resort and My Summer of Love are small but beautifully realized stories of intricate human emotion. His new picture The Woman In the Fifth, is in a somewhat different mode, edging toward genre, but it continues to display his […]

SAFE HOUSE:  Watch It At Home – You’ve Seen It     SAFE HOUSE feels like a remake, even though technically it’s not.  It’s a little bit Training Day, a little Bourne, a little Man On Fire (and everything else Tony Scott has ever done), with almost nothing added of its own, an exercise in […]

  SAVAGES:  Watch It At Home – Great Book, OK Movie Don Winslow’s novel SAVAGES is one of the extraordinary reads of recent years.  The plot may sound unremarkable–a mini-war is waged between a couple of Orange County drug dealers and a Mexican cartel–but the words “gripping” and “page-turning” don’t do justice to Winslow’s prose, […]

‎ Jacques Audiard doesn’t do sentimental. His last film, A Prophet, had the clear-eyed view of crime and the dramatic heft of a French version of “The Wire,” and his new and very different drama RUST & BONE benefits as well from his refusal to take the road of easy emotion. Lord knows, the bare […]

  TRANCE:  Watch It At Home – Tricky But Unsatisfying Thriller From Danny Boyle TRANCE is both extremely clever and remarkably stupid.  I wish I could explain exactly how, but Danny Boyle’s thriller, written by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, has the kind of story that piles reversals on twists on reveals, so there’s not […]

  2 GUNS:  Watch It At Home – Mindless Movie Action, The Old-Fashioned Way In this endless CG demo reel of a summer, the old-time, human-scaled mayhem of 2 GUNS is downright charming.  The idea of an action movie substituting a pair of charismatic stars and some analog shootouts for cities being pulverized in Imax […]

  THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (Focus/Universal) – Opens November 7  – Worth A Ticket There’s a benefit but also a burden to being clear-cut “Oscar bait.”  At this point we all know the kinds of movies the Academy looks upon with favor:  serious biographies, period pieces, leading actors who contort themselves in one way or […]