THE GREATEST BEER RUN EVER (Apple – September 30):  Peter Farrelly’s Green Book was one of the clearest beneficiaries of winning Toronto’s People Choice Award, vaulting from being entirely under the awards radar to a (somewhat divisive) Oscar for Best Picture a few months later.  No doubt the premiere of his follow-up The Greatest […]

  James Ponsoldt’s SMASHED (not to be confused with NBC’s Smash), which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, is a new spin on a fairly old story.  The concept goes back (at least) to 1962’s Days of Wine and Roses:  a couple (Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Aaron Paul), very much in love with both […]

  PROMETHEUS:  Worth A Ticket – For the Visual Splendor, Not the Plot   Expectations were undoubtedly too high for PROMETHEUS.  The Alien franchise (and notwithstanding Ridley Scott and co-writer Damon Lindelof’s hemming and hawing on the subject, it’s utterly clear that Prometheus is nothing but a prequel entry in the franchise) has never been […]

  LOOPER:  Worth A Ticket – Maybe Too Enthralling For Its Own Good   Rian Johnson’s most salient trait as a filmmaker may be a tendency to get carried away.  His first film, Brick, was a high school film noir so shrouded in mock-tough guy dialogue and exhaustively detailed mood that it forgot to tell […]

  BROKEN CITY:  Watch It At Home – Wahlberg and Crowe In An Intriguing But Too Simplistic Thriller Studios love nothing better than predictability, so since Mark Wahlberg had a tidy January hit last year with Contraband, it was no surprise when Fox slotted his new thriller BROKEN CITY for the same weekend in 2013.  […]

  WORLD WAR Z:  Watch It At Home – Third Act Heroics, In More Ways Than One The travails of WORLD WAR Z on the way to the screen have been widely discussed, and in the end the misshapen, Frankenstein-like $200M (plus marketing costs) assembly of various genres, writers, editors and re-shoots are something of […]

  HER:  Buy A Ticket – Tetrabytes of Love From Spike Jonze HER, which was presented at the AFI Film Festival before opening in theatres next month, is the first film Spike Jonze has directed from his own original script, and although its inventiveness recalls Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., the projects on which he collaborated […]

  ST. VINCENT (Weinstein) – Opens October 24 – Worth A Ticket Bill Murray has perfected the persona of the grouchy, reluctant hero.  The image has even attached itself to him professionally:  although he’s not close to being even semi-retired (ST. VINCENT, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and opens next month, will be […]