BLUE JASMINE:  Worth A Ticket – Cate Blanchett Is Dazzling in Woody Allen’s Latest Woody Allen has made so many movies at such regular intervals, and they’re so thematically linked, that it’s tempting to view his work as one gigantic serial, a by-now 60-hours-plus epic of disappointments in life and love, artistic fantasy, moral […]

    MIRROR MIRROR:  Not Even For Free – 7 Years Bad Luck     When it was announced that 2012 would bring two big-budget movie versions of the Snow White story, not to mention TV’s Once Upon A Time, in which Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a central character (and that’s not counting Grimm, another […]

  WRATH OF THE TITANS:  Watch It At Home – Put Back the Kraken   The producers of WRATH OF THE TITANS swore that this time the 3D would be better than it was in 2010’s Clash of the Titans, and you know what… it is.  That’s not saying an enormous amount, since the 3D […]

  JERSEY BOYS:  Watch It At Home – Clint Eastwood Directing the Broadway Hit Is As Weird As It Sounds No one will mistake the combination of Clint Eastwood and JERSEY BOYS for the fortuitous collision of chocolate and peanut-butter.  Some of Eastwood’s strongest tendencies as a filmmaker–admirable in the right context–fit badly here, and the result is […]

  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 […]

  QUARTET:  Watch It At Home – AARP’s Version of a Rock Concert Reunion Movie It may come as a surprise to some of the directors who’ve tangled with Dustin Hoffman to hear that QUARTET is supposed to mark his first time in charge, but officially, at least, Hoffman has never taken the reins on […]

> I wasn’t aware that the Toronto Film Festival showed TV pilots until I caught a screening of PEACE, LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING.  As a pilot, Peace certainly has its appeal, with a strong cast that includes Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and rising star Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), and a reliable […]

  HUSTLERS (STX – September 13):  Lorena Scafaria becomes the latest filmmaker failing to ascend Martin Scorsese Mountain.  Her Hustlers wants to be Goodfellas in its marrow, not only in its based-on-a-true-story tale of New York criminals who ride high and then go down, but in its structure of interspersing dispassionate after-the-fact narration with the […]