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, […]

  R.I.P.D.:  Not Even For Free – No Life After Death For This One Ryan Reynolds plays a dead man in the new R.I.P.D., and thus it makes sense that his character would be frustrated and depressed for much of its length, but watching him, you almost feel like his glumness is a message to […]

  PROJECT X:  Not Even For Free – Don’t RSVP   How is it that no one has yet produced a 3D found-footage movie?  You’d think the combination of the most (usually) mind-numbing gimmicks of the past decade would be a commercially sure bet, but so far it’s an untapped market. Meanwhile we have PROJECT […]

  RED 2:  Watch It At Home – Less Fizz in the Drink This Time The first RED was a disarming surprise, a rom-com action adventure about retired but very lethal spies as bubbly as it was explosive.  It made almost $200M at the worldwide box office, and while that’s not quite Expendables money ($274M […]

  BEAUTIFUL CREATURES:  Watch It At Home – Many Witches, Little Magic BEAUTIFUL CREATURES can’t be dismissed as merely an overlong TV episode meant for the CW, but it never really comes together, either.  Richard LaGravenese’s film is another on the tall pile of Young Adult fantasies trying to latch onto audiences now adrift without […]

  THE FAULT IN OUR STARS:  Worth A Ticket – John Green’s Beloved Book Is Well Treated By the Screen It’s almost impossible to describe the plot of John Green’s YA novel THE FAULT IN OUR STARS without making it sounding precious and shamelessly sentimental.  Erich Segal’s Love Story, the giant hit and instant self-parody […]

  INHUMANS:  Friday 9PM on ABC (starting Sept 29) – Change the Channel In this world of Peak TV, it’s harder for a new series to break through the clutter than it’s ever been, and that thicket will be a veritable forest during the fourth week of September, when the major broadcast networks will follow […]

  PEOPLE LIKE US:  Watch It At Home – Not The First Movie Like This   Sam Harper (Chris Pine) is a guy we’ve met before.  He’s the fast-talking, self-absorbed hustler who gets along in life by sheer nerve, and doesn’t really care about anyone else.  He needs to open himself up to the problems […]