THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES – Not Even For Free – An Incoherent Compendium of YA Tropes THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES isn’t so much a movie as it is a mash-up. They’re all here, crammed into 130 minutes of screen time–Twilight and Harry Potter and Buffy and True Blood and even […]
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT: Watch It At Home – Tom Clancy’s Hero Is Plugged Into A Routine Action Movie The fourth movie incarnation of Tom Clancy’s emblematic hero Jack Ryan (in 5 films) finds him much diminished. Ryan was introduced in Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt For Red October, in 1984, which was filmed […]
BIRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): Worth A Ticket – A Stunt, But An Amazing One Alejandro G. Inarritu’s BIRDMAN is, like this year’s Boyhood, a film defined by its form. In the case of Boyhood, that form was inextricable from its content: its depiction of the passage of time, and the experience […]
> 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 […]
THE THREE STOOGES: Watch It At Home – More Nyuks Than You’d Expect The Farrelly Brothers’ THE THREE STOOGES is better than its marketing campaign let on, and while that would be more impressive if the trailer and ad materials hadn’t been almost unwatchably bad, it still makes for a welcome relief. The […]
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 […]
Showbuzzdaily’s Top 10 Films of 2012 can be found here, and the Worst 10 are here. But there were other movies this year worth remembering: HONORABLE MENTIONS CLOUD ATLAS (Warners – October – written and directed by Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer): An impossibly ambitious epic that was thrilling when it worked. […]
THE PURGE: Watch It At Home – Dopey, Violent Allegory Nevertheless Packs a Punch THE PURGE is heavy-handed, borderline reprehensible nonsense–but that’s not to say it doesn’t work. James DeMonaco’s trim (85 minutes, including credits) thriller is set in 2022, when virtually all crime and unemployment has been wiped out in a newly-restored United […]