THE LONE RANGER:  Not Even For Free – The Silver Bullet Is Self-Inflicted Disney’s reluctance to produce THE LONE RANGER is well-documented; the studio even shut down the production shortly before shooting was to begin in order to force producer Jerry Bruckheimer, producer/director Gore Verbinski and producer/star Johnny Depp to slim down the production […]

  DELIVERY MAN:  Not Even For Free – Vince Vaughn Tries Wholesomeness DELIVERY MAN, alas, is Vince Vaughn’s Patch Adams.  Vaughn’s desire to try something new is understandable:  he’s in his mid-40s now, and his rat-a-tat schemer schtick has been running thin lately (his last real hit was Couples Retreat in 2009); at this rate, […]

  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 […]

> 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 […]

SAFE HOUSE:  Watch It At Home – You’ve Seen It     SAFE HOUSE feels like a remake, even though technically it’s not.  It’s a little bit Training Day, a little Bourne, a little Man On Fire (and everything else Tony Scott has ever done), with almost nothing added of its own, an exercise in […]

  SAVAGES:  Watch It At Home – Great Book, OK Movie Don Winslow’s novel SAVAGES is one of the extraordinary reads of recent years.  The plot may sound unremarkable–a mini-war is waged between a couple of Orange County drug dealers and a Mexican cartel–but the words “gripping” and “page-turning” don’t do justice to Winslow’s prose, […]

‎ 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 […]

  TRANCE:  Watch It At Home – Tricky But Unsatisfying Thriller From Danny Boyle TRANCE is both extremely clever and remarkably stupid.  I wish I could explain exactly how, but Danny Boyle’s thriller, written by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, has the kind of story that piles reversals on twists on reveals, so there’s not […]