EDGE OF TOMORROW:  Watch It At Home – Needed To Hit Reset One More Time There’s a lot of inventiveness in EDGE OF TOMORROW, which combines the premise of Groundhog Day with a War of the Worlds-like plot–certainly more than the usual for a mega-budgeted Hollywood summer action movie.  That keeps it compelling for […]

  THE BOURNE LEGACY:  Watch It At Home – Not Up To the Real Bournes THE BOURNE LEGACY has been concocted with a combination of ingenuity and desperation.  It exists because Universal–a studio dangerously light on action and fantasy movie franchises in an era where those are at the dead center of the business–couldn’t afford […]

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2:  Watch It At Home – The Webs Aren’t Very Tight This Time The huge, lumbering pieces of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 rarely succeed in fitting together.  It’s as though the studio and filmmakers–director Marc Webb and screenwriters Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jeff Pinkner (plus co-story writer James Vanderbilt)–started with […]

  THE HUNGER GAMES:  Worth A Ticket – The Odds Are Mostly In Its Favor   Now that virtually every blockbuster movie opens in IMAX, going to an IMAX theatre at this time of year provides a de facto trailer festival for an entire summer of (seemingly) more or less mindless spectacle.  As The Avengers […]

  RUBY SPARKS:  Worth A Ticket – A Narrative Feat   Woody Allen is one of the most influential figures in modern independent film, but his ghost is usually evident in the many romantic comedy-dramas we get each year paying homage to Annie Hall and Manhattan, about hyper-intellectual big-city types who lurch in and out […]

  SABOTAGE:  Not Even For Free – A Bloody Waste SABOTAGE is a lot bloodier than you’re expecting.  A lot bloodier.  I mention this upfront because although an R-rated Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle carries with it a certain likelihood of violence, the level of gore in Sabotage is more like what you’d see in a horror […]

  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, […]

  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 […]