The writer-director Mike Cahill has staked out a unique piece of narrative territory for himself.  In both Another Earth and his new I ORIGINS, which debuted at Sundance last week (and won the festival prize for best science-based work), he explores the point where factual science meets not just science fiction, but something more metaphysical, an area […]

  THE SUNLIT NIGHT (no distrib):  The last thing one would have expected from the director of the genuinely scabrous Wetlands was a follow-up that seems to trying to meld NY Jewish comedy with the kind of enchanted romcom spirit of Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero.  But that’s what David Wnendt has given us, and the […]

  The consensus is that the 2014 Sundance Film Festival was a solid but unexciting one.  To an extent that’s a business judgment: whatever its leaders may say publicly, Sundance gave itself up long ago to being as much an acquisition showcase as an artistic one, and this year, while quite a few films at […]

  THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Searchlight/Disney – October 21):  After a sojourn in America with 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh returns to Ireland with the comic tragedy (or vice versa) The Banshees of Inisherin.  The setting is an island off the Irish coast in the 1920s, where Padraic (Colin Farrell) […]

  The writing team of David Wain and Michael Showalter (Wain directs) certainly knew that THEY CAME TOGETHER would be far from the first parody of romantic comedy movies to come along.  Date Movie opened back in 2008, Friends With Benefits, although it had other fish to fry, featured a dead-on film-within-the-film satire that starred […]

  THE WHALE (A24 – December 9):  The fall film festivals usher in awards season, and no performance this year screams “Oscar bait” more than Brendan Fraser’s in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.  That’s not a knock on Fraser’s work, which is sensitive and moving, just a recognition that the attention of an Academy voter will […]

> DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions.  On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you’ve chosen.  If you do it right, you have […]

  A REAL PAIN (Searchlight/Disney – TBD):  David (Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins born just months apart and raised in close companionship.  Over the years, though, they’ve drifted apart.  Partly it’s because David remained in New York City, where he has a mundane but successful job selling […]