> Jim Field Smith’s comedy BUTTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, ambitiously makes a play for both the heartwarming indie Little Miss Sunshine audience and the satire-minded Election crowd.  That may be one play too many, but the movie is worth seeing anyway. Jason A Micallef’s first produced script is set in the […]

    BEING FLYNN:  Watch It At Home – Troubling Story That Doesn’t Go Deep Enough   There’s a scene in Paul Weitz’s new film BEING FLYNN where Jonathan Flynn (Robert DeNiro), the alcoholic, narcissistic, pitiful, self-destructive father of Nick (Paul Dano), reads to his son from a publisher’s rejection letter.  Jonathan sees himself as […]

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES:  Worth A Ticket – The Saga That Rewrote Superhero Movies Goes Out With A Weighty Bang Christopher Nolan likes his intricate, novelistic plotting.  You remember the portion of The Dark Knight where Batman had to travel to Hong Kong to capture a banker who was laundering money for Gotham City’s gangsters, because […]

  THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY – Watch It At Home – A Long, Slow Trek Through Middle-Earth As a devotee of the Tolkien canon, Peter Jackson is obviously responsive to sage words of wisdom and well-worn adages.  Here’s one he should have considered:  Quit While You’re Ahead.  But first, let’s talk about HFR. The […]

  UPSTREAM COLOR:  Worth A Ticket – But Not If You Require Coherent Plotting I’d be lying if I said I really knew what the hell was going on in UPSTREAM COLOR, and yet the experience of watching it was surprisingly enjoyable, even gripping in an odd way.  Watching Shane Carruth’s film (he serves as […]

  THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES –  Not Even For Free –  An Incoherent Compendium of YA Tropes THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES isn’t so much a movie as it is a mash-up.  They’re all here, crammed into 130 minutes of screen time–Twilight and Harry Potter and Buffy and True Blood and even […]

  JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT:  Watch It At Home – Tom Clancy’s Hero Is Plugged Into A Routine Action Movie The fourth movie incarnation of Tom Clancy’s emblematic hero Jack Ryan (in 5 films) finds him much diminished.  Ryan was introduced in Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt For Red October, in 1984, which was filmed […]

  BIRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance):  Worth A Ticket – A Stunt, But An Amazing One Alejandro G. Inarritu’s BIRDMAN is, like this year’s Boyhood, a film defined by its form.  In the case of Boyhood, that form was inextricable from its content:  its depiction of the passage of time, and the experience […]