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 […]

> Lynn Shelton’s Humpday in 2009 was one of the most engaging pictures to come out of the mumblecore movement (“mumblecore,” for the uninitiated = ultra-low-budget, small scale film with dialogue mostly improvised by the actors), and her new film YOUR SISTER’S SISTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last night, confirms that she’s […]

    THE VOW:  Not Even For Free – Forget About It   This year has brought us a far-fetched, but ultimately moving and deeply romantic story about a couple who have finally gotten together and married after a great deal of turmoil and who then face their greatest challenge of all:  a fluke accident […]

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN:  Watch It At Home – Not So Amazing   Part of the unwritten suspension of disbelief deal we have with the movie studios is that although we know they’re going to constantly tell us new versions of the same old stories for as long as we’ll buy tickets, they won’t abuse […]

  To address the very specific elephant in HYDE PARK ON HUDSON‘s room:  it’s no King’s Speech.  It’s hard to avoid the comparison, because the two movies have a clear overlap, Hyde Park being the story of the 1939 visit King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (aka Colin Firth and Helena Bonham Carter, but played here by Samuel […]

  G.I. JOE: RETALIATION:  Not Even For Free – Endlessly Dumb Exercise In Boom-Boom Action There’s a difference between making a movie for 11-year old boys and having a script that seems to have been written by one.  (Or in this case by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, doing a faithful imitation of one.)  Idiocy […]

  THE WOLVERINE:  Watch It At Home – The Clawed Superhero’s Latest is Distinctive But Unthrilling THE WOLVERINE, wanting to be both more and less than a typical superhero spectacle, demonstrates the perils of messing with the formula.  James Mangold’s film, with a script credited to Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, has the worthy aim […]