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 […]

> Although Sundance still has several days to go, and surprises could spring up at any time (yesterday The Surrogate, a drama with John Hawkes as a man in an iron lung who decides to lose his virginity to a sex therapist played by Helen Hunt, came out of nowhere to win a huge $6M […]

> There’s a principled discussion to be had about whether the Sundance Film Festival should be featuring movies that are essentially low-budget Hollywood entertainments made outside the studio system. But that discussion fades into irrelevance when the result is as hilarious and accomplished as FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL…, which premiered tonight. Directed by first-time […]

  IRON MAN 3:  Watch It At Home – Offbeat But Uneven Tentpole The last thing on earth that Shane Black, the co-writer (with Drew Pearce) and director of IRON MAN THREE (the way the credits spell it) seems to have wanted to make was an Iron Man movie, and that makes this third–or third […]

  VERONICA MARS:  Watch It At Home – Still a TV Show, For Better and Worse It was probably impossible for the movie of VERONICA MARS to live up to the story of how it came to be made.  That’s an epic, decade-long saga, which began when the TV series, critically praised but never a […]

    BEING FLYNN:  Watch It At Home – Troubling Story That Doesn’t Go Deep Enough   There’s a scene in Paul Weitz’s new film BEING FLYNN where Jonathan Flynn (Robert DeNiro), the alcoholic, narcissistic, pitiful, self-destructive father of Nick (Paul Dano), reads to his son from a publisher’s rejection letter.  Jonathan sees himself as […]

  42:  Watch It At Home – The Hallmark Baseball Hall of Fame It may well be that 42 is the Jackie Robinson movie audiences want.  It’s a straightforward, handsomely-produced, inspirational telling of a genuinely uplifting story, the 1946-47 baseball seasons when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) broke the color line in American baseball, first in the […]

      THE RAVEN:  Watch It At Home – Not Much Tell-Tale Heart (Or Brain)   Sometimes less-than-great minds think alike, too.  The idea of Edgar Allen Poe as a detective investigating strange phenomena was at the center of ABC’s busted pilot Poe last year (see our pilot report here), but it seems the […]