MARVELOUS AND THE BLACK HOLE:  Goodhearted YA comfort food.  Kate Tsang’s feature debut is about 13-year old Sammy (Miya Cech), who has become surly and rebellious toward her father Angus (Leonardo Nam) and sister Patricia (Kannon Omachi) since the death of her mother.  Things become even worse when potential stepmother Marianne (Paulina Lule) enters […]

    THE IMPOSSIBLE – Worth A Ticket – A Tsunami Film With Both Spectacle and Emotion Director Juan Antonio Bayona has done a spectacular job of re-creating the 2004 Asian tsunami in THE IMPOSSIBLE. Staged mostly in studio tanks with added CG imagery, the 10-minute long sequence puts Clint Eastwood’s version of the disaster in Hereafter […]

  THE GOOD HOUSE (DreamWorks – TBD):  By my count, it’s been two full decades since Sigourney Weaver was at the center of a feature film (that was Heartbreakers, where she shared the spotlight with Jennifer Love Hewitt), and that says an unfortunate amount about the American movie industry.  So even though Maya Forbes and […]

  THE MAGNIFICENT 7 (Village Roadshow/MGM/Columbia/Sony – Sept 23):  Cinema survived in 1960 when Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai was transformed into an American western, and it will survive this new adequate but uninspired remake of the remake.  Despite a script co-credited to True Detective‘s Nik Pizzolatto (with Richard Wenk), and a promising match-up […]

  THE POWER OF THE DOG (Netflix – theatrical release Nov 17, streaming Dec 1):  Jane Campion’s first feature in a dozen years is a powerhouse that won’t be to all tastes.  It’s a western that sets out to subvert the genre’s conventions, a slow-burn psychological thriller that eventually explodes, and in the end, somewhat […]

  OMAHA (no distrib):  A tiny tragedy that doesn’t reveal the true depths of its sadness until the very end.  One morning, a widowed father (John Magaro) hurries his children, 9-year old Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and 6-year old Charlie (Wyatt Solis), out of their house as it’s being foreclosed, and tells them to pack […]

  MEGALOPOLIS (American Zoetrope/Lionsgate – Sept. 27):  Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited, much-discussed return to epic filmmaking, self-financed to the tune of $125M+ (he’s paying for the marketing as well as the production) is, alas, a hapless failure in every way.  Its fatuous pretentiousness might be excusable if it were a dazzling piece of cinema, but it […]

  COLOSSAL (no distrib):  Well, you haven’t seen this take on sci-fi spectacles before.  In Nacho Vigalondo’s whatzit, party girl Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and her hometown friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) discover that they can cause their actions to be mirrored by a giant sea monster and robot terrorizing Seoul.  In other words, if one of […]