GRUDGE MATCH:  Watch It At Home – Far From A Knock-Out 1976 was the year of both Taxi Driver and Rocky.  Sylvester Stallone would go on to make innumerable millions, but he’d never be taken as seriously again as he was that year, as writer and star of the Cinderella movie he rode all the […]

  THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU (Warners) – Opens September 19 – Worth A Ticket Jonathan Tropper’s very successful day job is writing seriocomic novels about families and romance that are distinguished by their male protagonists–the ground he trods is similar to Nick Hornby’s, but without quite matching Hornby’s freshness of approach or wit.  […]

> Josh Radnor’s writing/directing debut happythankyoumoreplease, which played Sundance a couple of years ago, was a promising, entertaining NY-set romantic comedy-drama that hailed from the Woody Allen division of indie film. His second film LIBERAL ARTS, which premiered last night at the festival, still sips from the fount of Woody (in this case, particularly from […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  NOW YOU SEE ME:  Watch It At Home – Don’t Look Too Closely A summer action movie, like a magic act, is only as good as its final trick, and the one in the relatively low-budget NOW YOU SEE ME (which this season means something under $100M) is fairly entertaining–not impossible to foresee, if […]

  THE BOOK THIEF:  Watch It At Home – A Nazi Germany Fairy Tale THE BOOK THIEF is about as heartwarming and easygoing as any story could be that’s narrated by Death and touched by the Holocaust.  That’s its strength and also its weakness; it’s history’s abyss as a singalong. Based on the acclaimed bestselling […]

  BAD WORDS:  Watch It At Home – Hilarious, For a While BAD WORDS eventually has to spell out its plot, and that’s when, like many an initially enthusiastic competitor, it fades, becoming increasingly soft and even sentimental.  For a while though, Jason Bateman’s directing debut, from a script by Andrew Dodge, is resolutely, and […]