THE MONUMENTS MEN:  Watch It At Home – George Clooney’s Film Is No Classic Work of Art George Clooney’s THE MONUMENTS MEN is a startlingly complete failure.  It’s Clooney’s fifth film behind the camera (after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads, and The Ides of March), but it’s the […]

  THE INTERNSHIP:  Watch It At Home – No Search Engine Necessary To Predict the Plot Vince Vaughn has been playing his motormouth-with-a-heart-of-gold character pretty much non-stop since Swingers in 1996.  That’s 17 years of minimal variations on the same basic schtick.  It’s not that he can’t do anything else–he was quite good in a […]

  ENDER’S GAME:  Watch It At Home – Breaks The Rules, But Doesn’t Win the Game You don’t often see a $110M (plus marketing) YA adventure, intended to kick off a new movie franchise, as resolutely off-putting as ENDER’S GAME, and that’s worthy of some respect.  Its protagonist, Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), isn’t cool like a […]

  SABOTAGE:  Not Even For Free – A Bloody Waste SABOTAGE is a lot bloodier than you’re expecting.  A lot bloodier.  I mention this upfront because although an R-rated Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle carries with it a certain likelihood of violence, the level of gore in Sabotage is more like what you’d see in a horror […]

  PROMISED LAND:  Watch It At Home – Promise, But No Fulfillment There’s an original idea located somewhere near (but not at) the heart of PROMISED LAND:  start with what would normally be an obvious storyline about a good environmentalist (Dustin Noble, played by John Krasinski) vs. a heartless corporate tool (Steve Butler, in the […]

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 […]

  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 HUNGER GAMES:  Worth A Ticket – The Odds Are Mostly In Its Favor   Now that virtually every blockbuster movie opens in IMAX, going to an IMAX theatre at this time of year provides a de facto trailer festival for an entire summer of (seemingly) more or less mindless spectacle.  As The Avengers […]