JULIET, NAKED (no distrib):  Every Sundance has a title or two that isn’t particularly “indie,” other than by the fact that its stars aren’t hugely bankable.  These aren’t the films that set critical hearts aflutter, but they can be worthwhile all the same.  That’s the case with the likable Juliet, Naked, which continues Nick […]

  STATE OF THE UNION (Sundance Channel):  The lines between narrative visual media continue to blur, and State Of the Union is an A-list talent contribution to a genre that doesn’t exactly exist yet.  It’s a story told in ten 10-minute episodes, all of them written by the novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby and directed […]

  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 WOMAN KING (Tri-Star/Sony – Sept. 16):  Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King feels something like what would happen if the Themyscira Island Amazonian sequences of Wonder Woman were feature length.  Dana Stevens’ script (from a story by the actress/producer Maria Bello) is set in the 19th-century African kingdom of Dahomey, which is ruled by […]

  FREAKY TALES (no distrib):  The writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have returned from their profitable but unbeloved sojourn in the land of Captain Marvel to their indie roots with Freaky Tales.  While heartfelt and entertaining, the effort is also intensely derivative.  Fleck was a child of 1987 Oakland, where Freaky Tales takes place, and it’s a […]

> Although Fox Searchlight didn’t actually acquire Steve McQueen’s film Shame until last Saturday, in a sense the marketing campaign for the film began when the producers made it clear that the film would not be edited for US release, and would be distributed with an NC-17 rating. This quickly became the most memorable fact […]

> Although Sundance still has several days to go, and surprises could spring up at any time (yesterday The Surrogate, a drama with John Hawkes as a man in an iron lung who decides to lose his virginity to a sex therapist played by Helen Hunt, came out of nowhere to win a huge $6M […]

Michael Shannon is brilliant in ICEMAN, but it has to be said that he’s brilliant in just about the same way that he was in Take Shelter, in Revolutionary Road, on Boardwalk Empire, and even in The Runaways (although at least there he got to be funny).  For an actor who only became known to a wide audience 3 years ago […]