2012 was, in the end, a very good year for movies–or a a good half-year, more accurately.  With the studios continuing to load their best efforts into the festival- and awards-heavy fall and winter part of the calendar, not a single one of the Top 10 below opened before July, and only 3 before […]

  To address the very specific elephant in HYDE PARK ON HUDSON‘s room:  it’s no King’s Speech.  It’s hard to avoid the comparison, because the two movies have a clear overlap, Hyde Park being the story of the 1939 visit King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (aka Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, but played here by Samuel […]

  David Ayer’s END OF WATCH brings a new wrinkle to the “found-footage” genre by using it in a cop movie.  LAPD Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) wires a camera to his uniform, and constantly photographs what’s going on while he’s on the beat, supposedly to generate footage for a documentary he wants to put […]

‎ Jacques Audiard doesn’t do sentimental. His last film, A Prophet, had the clear-eyed view of crime and the dramatic heft of a French version of “The Wire,” and his new and very different drama RUST & BONE benefits as well from his refusal to take the road of easy emotion. Lord knows, the bare […]

  LOOPER:  Worth A Ticket – Maybe Too Enthralling For Its Own Good   Rian Johnson’s most salient trait as a filmmaker may be a tendency to get carried away.  His first film, Brick, was a high school film noir so shrouded in mock-tough guy dialogue and exhaustively detailed mood that it forgot to tell […]

  TOTAL RECALL:  Watch It At Home – Unmemorable TOTAL RECALL isn’t the worst picture of the summer, and probably won’t be the biggest flop, but it may be the most unnecessary waste of everyone’s time.  Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, while no masterpiece, had lots of Verhoeven’s oddball streak of pulp surrealism and […]

> I write this as a fairly obsessive fan of Stanley Kubrick, back since I desperately wanted to see A Clockwork Orange in its original X-rated release but was too young to get in. So the very idea of ROOM 237, a feature-length film by Rodney Ascher constructed of the theories and interpretations that have […]

  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 […]