EDGE OF TOMORROW:  Watch It At Home – Needed To Hit Reset One More Time There’s a lot of inventiveness in EDGE OF TOMORROW, which combines the premise of Groundhog Day with a War of the Worlds-like plot–certainly more than the usual for a mega-budgeted Hollywood summer action movie.  That keeps it compelling for […]

  BLACKHAT:  Not Even For Free – One of Michael Mann’s Worst Michael Mann has become a filmmaking vampire; he sucks the blood out of promising projects.  His new, seemingly up-to-the-minute computer hacking thriller BLACKHAT, following his problematic Miami Vice film and Public Enemies (as well as the pilot for HBO’s Luck) is once again his trademark kind […]

>Benh Zeitlin’s BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is the kind of movie that makes people wince when they hear “independent film”. A tale, with magical realist overtones, set in the mostly African-American poverty of the Louisiana bayous, it’s narrated by its precocious child protagonist, known as Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis). Hushpuppy lives with her father Wink […]

  NOAH:  Worth A Ticket –The Word According to Darren Aronofsky When Darren Aronofsky decided to follow Black Swan, the biggest hit of his career, with the story of Noah and the Ark, it seemed like a perverse choice.  Traditionally, the big-budget biblical epic has been among the blandest and most conservative of Hollywood genres, […]

  2 GUNS:  Watch It At Home – Mindless Movie Action, The Old-Fashioned Way In this endless CG demo reel of a summer, the old-time, human-scaled mayhem of 2 GUNS is downright charming.  The idea of an action movie substituting a pair of charismatic stars and some analog shootouts for cities being pulverized in Imax […]

  SAVAGES:  Watch It At Home – Great Book, OK Movie Don Winslow’s novel SAVAGES is one of the extraordinary reads of recent years.  The plot may sound unremarkable–a mini-war is waged between a couple of Orange County drug dealers and a Mexican cartel–but the words “gripping” and “page-turning” don’t do justice to Winslow’s prose, […]

> Michael Mohan’s SAVE THE DATE, which premiered this afternoon at Sundance, doesn’t earn its points from an original premise. It concerns 2 divergent sisters, Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) and Beth (Alison Brie), but mostly Sarah. While Beth, the control-freak, is relentlessly planning her upcoming wedding to musician Andrew (Martin Starr), the commitment-phobic Sarah is about […]

> Tonight at 43 real Imax theatres (the ones with the huge squarish screens), Warner Bros debuted an extended trailer for next summer’s THE DARK KNIGHT RISES shot in the full Imax format, consisting of the opening sequence and an extra minute or so of quick clips from the rest of the movie.  Apart from […]