ICE AGE:  CONTINENTAL DRIFT – Watch It At Home – The CSI of Family Franchises Does Its Thing   You know what the fabulous Peter Dinklage never gets to do on Game of Thrones?  Sing!  That’s remedied in the new 3D animated ICE AGE:  CONTINENTAL DRIFT, where as the voice of monkey pirate Captain […]

  BROS (Universal – Sept. 30):  Notwithstanding its occasional meta self-deprecation, it’s clear that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner (both writer/producers and respectively director and star) want Bros to be Hollywood’s first mainstream big-screen gay rom-com hit.  It’s fitting in a way, then, that like so many straight rom-coms before it, Bros suffers from third […]

  OBLIVION:  Worth A Ticket – Dramatically Uneven, But Visually Spectacular OBLIVION is amazing to look at.  Even though it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic landscape where movie and TV audiences seem to spend most of their time these days, the director Joseph Kosinski and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda (he just won the Oscar […]

  WINTER’S TALE:  Not Even For Free – 2 Hours of Thin Tinsel The new movie WINTER’S TALE makes one ponder the phrase “labor of love.”  It marks the feature directing debut of the enormously successful writer/producer Akiva Goldsman, whose films include A Time To Kill, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Hancock, The Da Vinci […]

ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  VAMPIRE HUNTER – Not Even For Free – An Unconstitutional Offense Against Moviegoers   Honestly:  how is a movie called ABRAHAM LINCOLN:  VAMPIRE HUNTER not a comedy?  It’s as if Woody Allen had given the title Bananas to his film Interiors–it makes no sense.  And yet, Timur Bekmambetov’s picture, and presumably the source […]

  THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN:  Not At Any Price – Should Have Been Pruned   When Disney decided to make THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN, it probably shouldn’t have put the word “odd” in the title.  Although I suppose it’s preferable to “weird” or “mildly creepy.” Timothy Green is the story of […]

  DJANGO UNCHAINED – Worth A Ticket – Pre-Civil War American History 101 With Professor Tarantino Quentin Tarantino is, when you think about it, the most successful avant-garde filmmaker in Hollywood.  His triumph is that although his films are as idiosyncratic and unique as, say, those of the Andersons Wes and Paul Thomas or of […]

  LAWLESS:  Watch It At Home – A Moonshine War To Make You Long for “Boardwalk Empire” Director John Hillcoat specializes in stark, emotionally distanced pulp, and if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, often it is.  His Australian western The Proposition, about a man murderously stalking his own brother, had a gnarled power, […]