ROBOCOP:  Watch It At Home – A Tinny Remake This weekend’s movie openings feature no less than 3 remakes of 1980s hits, with new versions of ROBOCOP, About Last Night and Endless Love arriving at once, but it’s just as notable that all three were R-rated in their original forms, and two have now […]

  MALEFICENT:  Watch It At Home – Only Jolie Casts a Spell The conflicting agendas driving the new MALEFICENT don’t leave much room for the movie itself.  Like Wicked and Once Upon A Time, it’s a revisionist fairy tale, specifically one that casts a sympathetic, proto-feminist eye on an iconic evil sorceress.  But it’s also […]

  SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED:  Worth A Ticket – Time Is Of Its Essence Nothing in SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED happens the way you’d expect.  The film was inspired by a real-life classified ad run by someone looking for a companion for time travel, advising that applicants “must bring your own weapons.”  But it’s not a docudrama, […]

  HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS:  Not At Any Price – Audiences Won’t Live Happily Ever After HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS is mostly terrible, but say this for it:  it’s not terrible like anything else out there.  If you’ve always wanted to see an R-rated, gore-ridden, smart-alecky anachronistic fantasy in which fairy tale characters […]

  THE GREAT GATSBY:  Watch It At Home – Moulin Gatsby Just for fun, let’s try to think of a worse match of filmmaker and material than Baz Luhrmann and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY.  Judd Apatow’s Macbeth?  Woody Allen’s Lord of the Rings?  Michael Bay’s Remembrance of Things Past?  Jean-Luc Godard’s Shrek?  (Although […]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  VAMPIRE HUNTER – Not Even For Free – An Unconstitutional Offense Against Moviegoers   Honestly:  how is a movie called ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  VAMPIRE HUNTER not a comedy?  It’s as if Woody Allen had given the title Bananas to his film Interiors–it makes no sense.  And yet, Timur Bekmambetov’s picture, and presumably the source […]

  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 […]

  ALEX CROSS – Not At Any Price – A Pilot For A Show You Wouldn’t Watch ALEX CROSS is as generic as a cop movie can be–it’s a few commercial breaks away from airing on CBS or TNT–but there’s been a certain fascination about it since it was announced that the lead role would […]