Click on SHOWBUZZDAILY‘s reviews from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in alphabetical order:   2 DAYS IN NEW YORK (Magnolia) BACHELORETTE (No Distrib) BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Fox Searchlight) CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER (Sony Pictures Classics) COMPLIANCE (Magnolia) FILLY BROWN (No Distrib) THE FIRST TIME (No Distrib) FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL… (Focus) […]

  SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD – Watch It At Home – Apocalypse Rom-Com Now   SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD marks the directing debut of its writer Lorene Scafaria, who until now has mostly been known as screenwriter of the marvelous 2008 Nick and Norah’s Infinite […]

  LINCOLN:  Worth A Ticket – The West Wing, Civil War Edition In today’s Hollywood, there aren’t many directors whose names are trademarks.  “A Martin Scorsese movie” doesn’t have the meaning that “an Alfred Hitchcock movie” used to have; David Fincher’s name doesn’t promise the same kind of specific entertainment that John Ford’s once did.  […]

  THIS IS 40 – Watch It At Home – Judd Apatow’s Midlife Crisis Comedy-Drama is Both Ambitious and Bland As Judd Apatow has matured as a filmmaker, he’s staked out a piece of territory that’s original but not necessarily workable:  he wants to be both the Paul Mazursky and the John Cassavetes of sitcom showrunners. Although […]

  PAIN AND GAIN:  Watch It At Home – Michael Bay On a Small Scale is Still Michael Bay There’s an almost meta strain that runs through Michael Bay’s PAIN AND GAIN, and you have to wonder, watching it, how much Bay was conscious of the fact that his customary musclebound, bloated, meatheaded style of […]

  The writer Peter Morgan is a whiz at boring into little-remembered (and in the US, sometimes little-known) crannies of recent history and scooping out the rich drama inside, with scripts like The Deal, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United to his credit, along with the more celebrated The Queen.  (His occasional forays into pure fiction […]

  THE LEGO MOVIE:  Buy A Ticket – The Pieces All Fit Together Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s THE LEGO MOVIE wants to have its family movie cake and eat it too, and it’s a remarkably tasty dish.  Lego takes the kind of endlessly clever, fully-realized fantasy universe we associate with the best of Pixar […]

  THE HOBBIT:  THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES – Watch It At Home – The Best of the Hobbit Trilogy Is Still Just Its Tallest Dwarf It’s hard to get around the sad fact that Peter Jackson’s THE HOBBIT trilogy has diminished the stature of his great Lord of the Rings series.  It’s all […]