The prevailing atmosphere in Denis Villenueve’s PRISONERS will be familiar to anyone who’s been watching cable TV drama for the past few years.  Gloom, grief, hopelessness, helpless rage–it’s home turf for shows like The Killing, The Bridge, Low Winter Sun, Broadchurch and their brethren.  (The rural Pennsylvania setting of Prisoners has even borrowed the endless raininess of The Killing‘s Seattle.) […]

> Derick Martini’s HICK is like a Sundance movie that took the wrong indie-film exit and wound up in Toronto.  For whatever reason, Toronto’s film festival tends to find itself with fewer stories of young people from small towns who come of age on the road, so Hick has a little air of distinction here. […]

  There is a reason, or at least an argument, for why almost everything in Paul Haggis’s THIRD PERSON feels synthetic and contrived–but I can’t make it here, because doing so would expose the film’s purported surprises.  And I’m not sure it really matters anyway, since even though, after the fact, one might be able to “justify” […]

  THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release):  The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage.  A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened.  That makes The Eyes of […]

  But for one unfortunately critical element, Logan and Noah Miller’s SWEETWATER (the brothers rewrote a script originally by Andrew McKenzie) is a highly enjoyable darkly comic western, as subsumed in stylized movie traditions (and their subversion) as a Tarantino movie, but without Tarantino’s post-modern stew of references. Sweetwater is your basic frontier town, half-way to Santa […]

  THE ROOM NEXT DOOR (Sony Classics – Dec. 20):  Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language feature is in keeping with his recent, more contemplative films (Pain and Glory, Parallel Mothers), but it’s even more restrained than those.  Based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez, it’s virtually a chamber piece for two actresses, Tilda Swinton (who’d previously starred […]

  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 […]

  The “spoiler” situation with respect to Richard Linklater’s BEFORE MIDNIGHT is a particularly tricky one, because for those passionately invested in the saga that began with 1995’s Before Sunrise and continued in 2004 with Before Sunset, even the most bare-bones description of what the new film is about, which must disclose, by necessity, what’s become of Celine (Julie Delpy) and […]