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 […]
BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR: Buy A Ticket – A 3-Hour Deep Dive Into A Character’s Soul BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is relentlessly, sometimes suffocatingly intimate. By that I don’t mean its celebrated, lengthy (although simulated) sex scenes between lead characters Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) and Emma (Lea Seydoux), which have earned it an […]
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 […]
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 […]
THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY: Buy A Ticket – Ben Stiller’s Imaginative, Flawed Reboot Of The Classic Tale The movies Ben Stiller directs for himself (Reality Bites, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder) are nearly always more interesting than the product he churns out as an actor (the Night At the Museum franchise, the Meet the […]
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 […]
IT’S A DISASTER: Worth A Ticket – And They Feel Just (More Or Less) Fine IT’S A DISASTER is the movie Seeking A Friend For the End of the World aspired, but failed, to be: a laugh-out-loud, throat-clutching comedy about catastrophe. Disaster, which premiered at this year’s LA Film Festival, doesn’t yet have […]
SAVING MR. BANKS: Buy A Ticket – Positively Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious SAVING MR. BANKS , which screened at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles last night before opening in theaters next month, is a moviegoer’s dream of Hollywood popular art, superbly melding history, personality, humor, sentiment and glitz with little fault or sign of strain. […]