OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL:  Watch It At Home – Not All Yellow Brick Roads Are Golden The digital landscapes in Sam Raimi’s prequel OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL are gorgeous:  eye-poppingly colorful, and crammed with beautiful, intricate detail.  There’s also a flying, talking monkey and a living china doll, both generated in the […]

  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 […]

  THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE:  Not Even For Free – While You’re Watching… Poof!  It’s Gone It would have been a neat trick if Steve Carell could have pulled off as clear a Will Ferrell role as the lead in THE INCREDIBLE BURT WONDERSTONE.  But Ferrell’s brand of flamboyant, childish, deluded yet vulnerable vaingloriousness just […]

  JACK REACHER:  Watch It At Home – Next on TNT:  Tom Cruise If Tom Cruise’s career ever takes him to do a TV pilot, it would be a lot like JACK REACHER.  And not a classy, sophisticated pilot for AMC or HBO or Showtime or FX–no, this would be a standard basic cable procedural, or a […]

  TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Not Even For Free – Hollywood’s Blockbuster Mentality To the Max Here are just a few of the epic movies with running times shorter than the 165 minutes of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Apocalypse Now, Avatar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Bridge On the River Kwai, Boogie Nights and Empire […]

> The festival has its first crowd-pleaser in CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER, a light but heartfelt romantic comedy-drama in the Woody Allen vein. Written by Rashida Jones (who also stars as Celeste) and Will Mc McCormack (on hand as well as a supportive weed dealer), it takes a different slant on the usual rom-com by […]

> I write this as a fairly obsessive fan of Stanley Kubrick, back since I desperately wanted to see A Clockwork Orange in its original X-rated release but was too young to get in. So the very idea of ROOM 237, a feature-length film by Rodney Ascher constructed of the theories and interpretations that have […]

  A week at the Toronto Film Festival added up to 24 screenings–a decent pace, but not an outstanding one.  Blame some vagaries of the festival’s scheduling, and a baseline decision that Midnight Madness was too much midnight and maybe even too much madness.  The potential awards contenders I wasn’t able to get to included […]