JACK REACHER:  Watch It At Home – Next on TNT:  Tom Cruise If Tom Cruise’s career ever takes him to do a TV pilot, it would be a lot like JACK REACHER.  And not a classy, sophisticated pilot for AMC or HBO or Showtime or FX–no, this would be a standard basic cable procedural, or a […]

  TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – Wes Anderson’s Latest Fancy Box Has Something Inside Where has the “Academy” 1.37:1 screen aspect ratio been all of Wes Anderson’s life?  One of Anderson’s visual motifs (some would say “fetishes”) is to photograph his actors enclosed in windows, doorways, or other pieces of production design, […]

  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 […]

> Sundance changed the way it kicks things off this year. Instead of a single high-profile Opening Night Film (which has almost always turned out to be a disappointment), the festival screened several smaller films. For those of us who arrived before the madness begins in earnest tomorrow, there was the chance to get Wait […]

  DESPICABLE ME 2:  Watch It At Home – Good-Hearted If Unexciting Sequel For the Kids Despicable Me was far from the most ambitious or striking animated feature of the last few years, but it was definitely cute.  It told the story of supervillain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), a Scrooge type with an unplaceable […]

> I wasn’t aware that the Toronto Film Festival showed TV pilots until I caught a screening of PEACE, LOVE & MISUNDERSTANDING.  As a pilot, Peace certainly has its appeal, with a strong cast that includes Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and rising star Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene), and a reliable […]

  THE BOOK THIEF:  Watch It At Home – A Nazi Germany Fairy Tale THE BOOK THIEF is about as heartwarming and easygoing as any story could be that’s narrated by Death and touched by the Holocaust.  That’s its strength and also its weakness; it’s history’s abyss as a singalong. Based on the acclaimed bestselling […]