DREDD, which kicked off the merrily disreputable Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival last night, isn’t much, but no one can say the director Pete Travis wasted his 3D budget. Things are constantly hovering, fluttering or–often–splattering in the foreground of the frame, and the images do a better job of suggesting visual depth […]
HITCHCOCK: Worth A Ticket (Opens November 23) – A Moderately Good Eve-ening The American Film Institute’s yearly festival opened tonight with the world premiere of the fittingly movie-centric HITCHCOCK. In choosing the film, AFI celebrated another occasional Hollywood tradition: the tendency to make two unrelated films on the same subject in a brief period […]
The actress Lake Bell’s feature-film writing/directing debut IN A WORLD… has a fresh slant on showbiz comedy, and it’s both consistently likable and sometimes very funny. It’s also sloppy, overbroad, predictable and so technically flat that it hurts the eyes to watch–but that’s what first films are for. The general idea of In A World…, in which various […]
>SHOWBUZZDAILY will be at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and today TIFF announced the first group of movies being screened (there are plenty more to come over the next few weeks). Here’s the full list, and some titles worthy of initial enthusiasm: GALAS ALBERT NOBBS: Oscar Bait Alert, with Glenn Close as a […]
> 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 […]
THE MAGNIFICENT 7 (Village Roadshow/MGM/Columbia/Sony – Sept 23): Cinema survived in 1960 when Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai was transformed into an American western, and it will survive this new adequate but uninspired remake of the remake. Despite a script co-credited to True Detective‘s Nik Pizzolatto (with Richard Wenk), and a promising match-up […]
JOJO RABBIT (Fox Searchlight – October 4): The discourse about Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit has quickly become a debate between those who think its Nazi-era black comedy is authentically daring, and those who feel its purported audacity is a pretense covering a merely middlebrow sensibility. (Note: every person in the history of language who […]
The borders between “movies” and “television” were already beginning to buckle pre-pandemic, thanks to Netflix and the desire of studios to release their product on as many simultaneous platforms as possible. Now, of course, we’ve been 4 months without movie theaters, and the most optimistic view is that wide openings are still weeks if […]