SAVING MR. BANKS:  Buy A Ticket – Positively Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious SAVING MR. BANKS , which screened at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles last night before opening in theaters next month, is a moviegoer’s dream of Hollywood popular art, superbly melding history, personality, humor, sentiment and glitz with little fault or sign of strain.  […]

  The year’s Top 10 movies are here, and a variety of honorable mentions are here.  But now for something completely different… Along with the egg nog and tinsel, there’s a certain undeniable seasonal pleasure to be had in singling out the truly spectacular misses of the movie year for some shame and ridicule.  We […]

  The borders between “movies” and “television” were already beginning to buckle pre-pandemic, thanks to Netflix and the desire of studios to release their product on as many simultaneous platforms as possible.  Now, of course, we’ve been 4 months without movie theaters, and the most optimistic view is that wide openings are still weeks if […]

  NOTE TO READERS: Warner Bros has an embargo in place that delays reviews of THE HOBBIT: THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG until Sunday morning.  While I viewed the film as a member of the general public, and hadn’t obtained my ticket subject to that embargo, I have agreed with Warners to abide by its terms, […]

  TOTAL RECALL:  Watch It At Home – Unmemorable TOTAL RECALL isn’t the worst picture of the summer, and probably won’t be the biggest flop, but it may be the most unnecessary waste of everyone’s time.  Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, while no masterpiece, had lots of Verhoeven’s oddball streak of pulp surrealism and […]

  LES MISERABLES – Worth A Ticket – One Day More Finally Arrives In light of some of the early reactions, perhaps the most important thing to note about LES MISERABLES the film is that it is, in fact, the film of Les Miserables–and so, yes, bombastic voices raised in song and unfettered melodrama are the order of the day. […]

  WHITE HOUSE DOWN:  Worth A Ticket – Things Go “Boom”; We Go “Yay” WHITE HOUSE DOWN is wondrously stupid, so merrily, spectacularly idiotic that it washes the taste of Olympus Has Fallen and its grim mediocrity right out of your mouth.  Even though the threat of nuclear annihilation is waved around, and many random […]

  SIDE EFFECTS:  Watch It On TV – Soderbergh’s Final Big-Screen Film (For Now) Isn’t His Best Steven Soderbergh’s announcement that with SIDE EFFECTS, his career as a director of movies produced to play in theaters has–at least for now–come to an end is sad news for moviegovers.  (Soderbergh still has an HBO biography of […]