Stu Zicherman’s A.C.O.D. (written by Zicherman and Ben Karlin) suffers a bit from a familiar indie comedy malady:  the conflicting desires to tell meaningful and even dark stories, while at the same time getting a studio pick-up and selling some tickets.  The result, while funny at times and incisive at times, doesn’t successfully combine both. […]

  There’s no cutesiness to be found in John Curran’s film TRACKS, a bracingly non-Disneyfied true-life nature tale.  In the mid-1970s, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson decided to walk across almost two thousand miles of desert to the Indian Ocean, accompanied for the most part by only a few camels and her faithful dog. […]

  THE JUDGE (Warners) – Opens October 10 – Watch It At Home Since the first Iron Man opened, Robert Downey Jr. has been one of the world’s biggest (and wealthiest) stars.  But he hasn’t used his superpowers for good:  in the 6 years that have followed, he’s interspersed Tony Stark extravaganzas only with entries […]

  Scott Cooper’s BLACK MASS is a beautifully put together and wonderfully acted true-life drama about Boston gangsters and the law, but it has a void at its center that holds it back from greatness.  That center isn’t occupied by JoOut ofhnny Depp or his character James “Whitey” Bulger (one used that nickname with him […]

  AMERICAN ANIMALS (no distrib):  It’s not easy to come up with a new spin on the venerable heist movie genre, but writer/director Bart Layton has managed just that with American Animals.  Layton had been until now a documentarian, and here he intercuts between his dramatized version of a real life robbery in which four […]

  LATE NIGHT (Amazon):  It’s legitimate to note that the thoroughly mainstream and commercial Late Night belonged at Sundance just about as much as The Devil Wears Prada would have, since to a large extent it transposes Prada from fashion to the world of late-night talk shows.  The festival’s decision to host Late Night (which paid […]

  JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (Warners/HBO Max – February 12):  The title refers to the FBI informant Bill O’Neal (played here by LaKeith Stanfield) and the Illinois Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).  Although Hampton was only 21 years old, he was so charismatic and successful–he had put together a local coalition that […]

  THE FABELMANS (Universal – November 11):  Like all superheroes, Steven Spielberg has an origin story, and he tells it in The Fabelmans, whose world premiere was far and away the signature event of this year’s Toronto Film Festival.  Bits and pieces of this lore have been scattered throughout Spielberg’s filmmaking career, with all its […]