STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS:  Worth A Ticket – Another Satisfying Trip On the Enterprise J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot cohorts, writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, did a bang-up job rejuvenating the Star Trek franchise in 2009, and their first next journey where many, many have gone before, the new STAR TREK: INTO […]

  BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR:  Buy A Ticket – A 3-Hour Deep Dive Into A Character’s Soul BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is relentlessly, sometimes suffocatingly intimate.  By that I don’t mean its celebrated, lengthy (although simulated) sex scenes between lead characters Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) and Emma (Lea Seydoux), which have earned it an […]

  ENDLESS LOVE:  Not Even For Free – Hopeless Wreck Truly:  why does this new ENDLESS LOVE exist?  Even on the crassest commercial level, it makes very little sense.  The 1981 Franco Zeffirelli/Brooke Shields/Martin Hewitt version is remembered as neither good nor particularly successful (it made only half as much as Shields’ Blue Lagoon had […]

  Ridley Scott’s THE MARTIAN is the jaunty sci-fi offspring of Apollo 13 and McGyver, Scott’s least self-important movie in years and not coincidentally his most enjoyable.  Drew Goddard’s expertly crafted script (based on the best-selling novel by Andy Weir) has a premise both simple and massively complex:  during a giant sandstorm on the surface […]

> The fundamental problem with LAY THE FAVORITE, Stephen Frears’ new film that premiered last night at Sundance, is that it’s made by people who seem to have little if any interest in gambling. And since this is a movie about the thrill and especially the business of gambling, that means they don’t have any […]

LOLA VERSUS:  Watch It At Home – An Unmemorable Woman   LOLA VERSUS‘ ambition is pretty clear:  it wants to be the 2012 version of Paul Mazursky’s 1978 comedy-drama AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, which is to say covering all the bases except the “married” part.  We meet Lola (Greta Gerwig) on her 29th birthday, and she […]

  FRANKENWEENIE:  Watch It At Home – Tim Burton Tries To Bring His Old Creation Back to Life Tim Burton certainly can’t have planned it this way, but his new stop-motion feature version of FRANKENWEENIE serves, in a sense, as a microcosm of his career:  starting as a modestly appealing and very personal meld of […]

  THE HEAT:  Watch It At Home – A Functional Vehicle for Two Strong Stars Let’s face it:  it doesn’t really matter what THE HEAT is about.  A streetwise Boston cop, a straight-laced FBI agent, some crimes that need solving, teamwork imposed on the pair, hostility that turns gradually into friendship, a few mutual life […]