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 […]

  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 […]

  THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER:  Worth A Ticket – The Serious Side of Being a Teen We certainly don’t lack for stories about high school in our popular culture.  The CW and ABCFamily networks are almost entirely devoted to that brief, formative period (as is MTV when it does scripted shows like Awkward.). […]

  TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE:  Worth A Ticket – Another Late Autumn Role for Clint Think of TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE as Million Dollar Baby Lite.  Again we have the cranky older man (Clint Eastwood, this time a baseball scout instead of a boxing trainer) dealing with a feisty, stubborn young woman (Amy Adams as […]

  This year’s Toronto International Film Festival had a very solid line-up, so much so that although the titles below are listed in rough order of preference, even the worst of them is of some interest, very possibly worth seeing for those intrigued by the genre or filmmaker.  The Festival, as has been the case […]

  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 […]

  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, […]

DREDD, which kicked off the merrily disreputable Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival last night, isn’t much, but no one can say the director Pete Travis wasted his 3D budget. Things are constantly hovering, fluttering or–often–splattering in the foreground of the frame, and the images do a better job of suggesting visual depth […]