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 […]

  Transgender issues have been such hot-button topics in the news lately that people may not be prepared for how muted and delicate Tom Hooper’s THE DANISH GIRL is.  The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival and then screened at Toronto, before beginning a quest for awards later in the year, barely deals […]

  PRESENCE (Neon – TBD):  Steven Soderbergh has always appreciated, and often demanded, a challenge, and in Presence he and screenwriter David Koepp have taken an original approach to the haunted house genre.  The point of view character here is the ghost itself, who we’re told has an inchoate consciousness that can’t distinguish between past […]

  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 […]

  GLASS ONION (Netflix – November 4 in theaters, December 23 online):  After Rian Johnson’s Knives Out broke through to become one of the increasingly few non-IP-based mainstream hits in the market ($311.6M worldwide), Netflix moved aggressively to buy out the franchise, reportedly paying $450M for the next 2 crime-solving adventures of detective Benoit Blanc […]

  The screenwriter James Vanderbilt has made his directing debut with TRUTH, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, and at times it’s clear that this is a writer’s movie:  Vanderbilt gives no fewer than three of his characters the opportunity for a Rousing Final Speech, something another director might well have toned down.  […]

  RUSTIN (Netflix – Nov. 17):  The director and producer George C. Wolfe is a towering figure in American theater, but his films to date have been wobbly at worst (A Night in Rodanthe, You’re Not You) and sturdy at best (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks).  Rustin marks his most accomplished […]

  THE FAREWELL (A24):  Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is what could be called Sundance Classic, a small, very personal film nurtured by the festival into wide enough attention that A24 paid $6M to release it.  It’s based on Wang’s own life, so much so that it would be a spoiler to reveal the caption to […]