LIFE OF PI:  Worth A Ticket – A Floating Display of Visual Marvels A boy and a Bengal tiger get into a lifeboat… The digital paintbox now available to filmmakers provides an almost limitless variety of visual possibilities, and also a certain amount of temptation, because like any resource, it can be overused.  Ang […]

  THE TWILIGHT SAGA:  BREAKING DAWN PART 2:  Watch It At Home – Fangless Eternal Love, For the Last Time Even for those of us decidedly not devotees of the TWILIGHT saga, there are some things to be said for BREAKING DAWN PART 2, beyond the obvious one that it marks the last time we’ll […]

  LINCOLN:  Worth A Ticket – The West Wing, Civil War Edition In today’s Hollywood, there aren’t many directors whose names are trademarks.  “A Martin Scorsese movie” doesn’t have the meaning that “an Alfred Hitchcock movie” used to have; David Fincher’s name doesn’t promise the same kind of specific entertainment that John Ford’s once did.  […]

  SKYFALL:  Worth A Ticket – Bond Reborn For years–decades, actually–there have been periodic murmurings that a “real” director would one day take the helm of a James Bond movie.  At various times, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino were among those mentioned, and apparently at least some of them did have discussions with […]

  HITCHCOCK:  Worth A Ticket (Opens November 23) – A Moderately Good Eve-ening The American Film Institute’s yearly festival opened tonight with the world premiere of the fittingly movie-centric HITCHCOCK.  In choosing the film, AFI celebrated another occasional Hollywood tradition:  the tendency to make two unrelated films on the same subject in a brief period […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  FRANKENWEENIE:  Watch It At Home – Tim Burton Tries To Bring His Old Creation Back to Life Tim Burton certainly can’t have planned it this way, but his new stop-motion feature version of FRANKENWEENIE serves, in a sense, as a microcosm of his career:  starting as a modestly appealing and very personal meld of […]