PROMISED LAND:  Watch It At Home – Promise, But No Fulfillment There’s an original idea located somewhere near (but not at) the heart of PROMISED LAND:  start with what would normally be an obvious storyline about a good environmentalist (Dustin Noble, played by John Krasinski) vs. a heartless corporate tool (Steve Butler, in the […]

  RED 2:  Watch It At Home – Less Fizz in the Drink This Time The first RED was a disarming surprise, a rom-com action adventure about retired but very lethal spies as bubbly as it was explosive.  It made almost $200M at the worldwide box office, and while that’s not quite Expendables money ($274M […]

  FUN SIZE:  Not For Any Price – As Halloween Movies Go, John Carpenter’s Are Funnier FUN SIZE marks the feature directing debut of Josh Schwartz, but he’s hardly a neophyte, being the muscle behind (and for the most part a writer/creator of) The O.C., Gossip Girl, Chuck and Hart of Dixie.  He certainly knows […]

  TAKEN 2:  Watch It At Home – “Particular Set of Skills” Indeed   As silly sequels to mindless hits go, TAKEN 2 is fairly entertaining, at least for a while.  The first movie, of course, was a surprise smash in 2009, at $145M (in the US alone) Liam Neeson’s biggest success as a solo […]

  HUSTLERS (STX – September 13):  Lorena Scafaria becomes the latest filmmaker failing to ascend Martin Scorsese Mountain.  Her Hustlers wants to be Goodfellas in its marrow, not only in its based-on-a-true-story tale of New York criminals who ride high and then go down, but in its structure of interspersing dispassionate after-the-fact narration with the […]

      BATTLESHIP:  Not Even For Free – Watch a Transformers DVD Instead   For about half an hour, BATTLESHIP could fool you into thinking it’s not the movie you were expecting it to be.  It begins as the story of Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), a good-looking, unmotivated screw-up who lives with his straight-arrow […]

> Or if the title were a Jeopardy answer, the question would be: what should writer/director Rodrigo Cortes have paid attention to, before he typed “The End” on his script Red Lights wouldn’t have been a festival movie even if it had been good. It’s no more than high-grade hokum (and not that high), and […]

  KILLING THEM SOFTLY:  Watch It At Home – Low-Rent Gangsters and A Study In American Existentialism Andrew Dominik’s talents as a filmmaker are matched only by his pretentions.  Dominik’s first film was the Australian Chopper, which introduced Eric Bana to the world, but he’s better known for his mournful The Assassination of Jesse James […]