LONE SURVIVOR:  Buy A Ticket – A Powerfully Visceral Tale of War Peter Berg’s LONE SURVIVOR, which was shown at the AFI Film Festival tonight in advance of its release late next month, is a docudrama in the truest sense:  based on the memoir by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, it exists with one aim […]

> Los Angelenos will have a chance to get advance looks at some of this year’s Oscar candidates at the AFI Film Festival, which begins in just about 2 weeks.  Today the Festival announced the Gala and Special Screenings, which typically make up the bulk of the high-profile titles, and they include quite a few […]

  NEBRASKA:  Buy A Ticket – A Lovely, Tart Slice of Americana An unusually strong season for American movies continues with the arrival of the simple and profound NEBRASKA, directed by Alexander Payne from a marvelous script by first-time feature writer Bob Nelson.  Among its other virtues, it manages to feature within its 114 minutes […]

  RUBY SPARKS:  Worth A Ticket – A Narrative Feat   Woody Allen is one of the most influential figures in modern independent film, but his ghost is usually evident in the many romantic comedy-dramas we get each year paying homage to Annie Hall and Manhattan, about hyper-intellectual big-city types who lurch in and out […]

  As a movie year, 2013 was awfully slow in getting started.  Hardly anything worth remembering opened all winter and spring–only 1 movie in the Top 10 below opened in theatres before late May.  Summer brought some relief, and then the film festival season that began at the end of August opened the doors wide […]

  INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS:  Buy A Ticket – 1960s Folk Music A La The Coens INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS, which screened as the Closing Night presentation of the AFI Film Festival in advance of its regular run next month, is Joel and Ethan Coen in their enigmatically allegorical mode, but unlike its more overtly stylized predecessors Barton […]

  LIFE OF PI:  Worth A Ticket – A Floating Display of Visual Marvels A boy and a Bengal tiger get into a lifeboat… The digital paintbox now available to filmmakers provides an almost limitless variety of visual possibilities, and also a certain amount of temptation, because like any resource, it can be overused.  Ang […]