THE MASTER:  Worth A Ticket – The Title Describes the Filmmaker Our shorthand for describing movie directors, even great ones, is to compare them to other filmmakers.  So Quentin Tarantino is Sergio Leone plus half a dozen (at least) obscure exploitation and art-house directors, Soderbergh is Godardian, Scorsese recreates the aesthetic of Michael Powell, […]

  LONE SURVIVOR:  Buy A Ticket – A Powerfully Visceral Tale of War Peter Berg’s LONE SURVIVOR, which was shown at the AFI Film Festival tonight in advance of its release late next month, is a docudrama in the truest sense:  based on the memoir by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, it exists with one aim […]

> Pawel Pawlikowski is a filmmaker whose name deserves to be better known: his films Last Resort and My Summer of Love are small but beautifully realized stories of intricate human emotion. His new picture The Woman In the Fifth, is in a somewhat different mode, edging toward genre, but it continues to display his […]

  A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST:  Not Even For Free – They Don’t Include “Die Laughing” Seth MacFarlane, out from behind his high-concept animated and fantasy premises, has a surprisingly retro, even conservative sense of humor.  For all the many, many four-letter words in A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, and […]

  THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE:  Not Even For Free – While You’re Watching… Poof!  It’s Gone It would have been a neat trick if Steve Carell could have pulled off as clear a Will Ferrell role as the lead in THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE.  But Ferrell’s brand of flamboyant, childish, deluded yet vulnerable vaingloriousness just […]

  HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2:  Worth A Ticket – Bigger Isn’t Always Better, But Still Good Enough Like a lot of sequels animated and not, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 has been conceived on a much more spectacular scale than its predecessor, and as it’s become a bigger and more conventional action-adventure, […]

‎ 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 […]

  OUT OF THE FURNACE:  Watch It At Home – Dark Thriller Is Less Weighty Than It Thinks A great deal of heart and effort has gone into OUT OF THE FURNACE, and it’s disappointing to see the film resolve itself into little more than a fairly routine revenge melodrama, even though director Scott Cooper […]