THE MASTER:  Worth A Ticket – The Title Describes the Filmmaker Our shorthand for describing movie directors, even great ones, is to compare them to other filmmakers.  So Quentin Tarantino is Sergio Leone plus half a dozen (at least) obscure exploitation and art-house directors, Soderbergh is Godardian, Scorsese recreates the aesthetic of Michael Powell, […]

      WANDERLUST:  Watch It At Home – Hippy Jokes Thawed Out From 1966   The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in […]

  THE CONJURING:  Worth A Ticket – Retro Horror, In A Good Way Watching The Exorcist recently, for the first time in probably a decade, the most striking thing about it was its insistence on a palpable, sometimes documentary-like reality.  Director William Friedkin moved the film at a measured, even slow pace, only gradually raising […]

  OLDBOY:  Watch It At Home – Spike Lee’s Graphic Remake Falls Flat In the course of his career, Spike Lee has made some violent movies, but he’s never gotten off on the bloodshed; he’s not a rapturous pulpist, like Quentin Tarantino or Brian DePalma in his prime.  To remake Chan-Wook Park’s cult classic OLDBOY, […]

  NEED FOR SPEED:  Watch It At Home – Not Enough Fuel If there was ever a movie that didn’t need to be over 2 hours long, the relatively unpretentious NEED FOR SPEED was it.  Action movies these days too often feel like they have to be epics, loaded with backstory and climactic showdowns that […]

  Click on SHOWBUZZDAILY‘s reviews from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, in alphabetical order:   2 DAYS IN NEW YORK (Magnolia) BACHELORETTE (No Distrib) BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD (Fox Searchlight) CELESTE AND JESSE FOREVER (Sony Pictures Classics) COMPLIANCE (Magnolia) FILLY BROWN (No Distrib) THE FIRST TIME (No Distrib) FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL… (Focus) […]

  THE JUDGE (Warners) – Opens October 10 – Watch It At Home Since the first Iron Man opened, Robert Downey Jr. has been one of the world’s biggest (and wealthiest) stars.  But he hasn’t used his superpowers for good:  in the 6 years that have followed, he’s interspersed Tony Stark extravaganzas only with entries […]

  JERSEY BOYS:  Watch It At Home – Clint Eastwood Directing the Broadway Hit Is As Weird As It Sounds No one will mistake the combination of Clint Eastwood and JERSEY BOYS for the fortuitous collision of chocolate and peanut-butter.  Some of Eastwood’s strongest tendencies as a filmmaker–admirable in the right context–fit badly here, and the result is […]