> The Toronto Film Festival has announced its second helping of titles for next month’s worldwide gathering of film professionals and fanatics.  These may be less star-studded than the last group of films announced, but there are still quite a few intriguing titles.  As part of our continuing coverage of the movie awards season that, […]

>   THE DESCENDANTS:  Worth A Ticket – Flawed But Heartfelt It’s taken an unaccountable 7 years for Alexander Payne to follow up Sideways, the biggest hit of his career,  with THE DESCENDANTS, which will hit theatres in time for a serious awards season push in late November.  Sideways and Payne’s earlier Election are two […]

  The Toronto International Film Festival is, of the major North American festivals, by far the most pleasant to attend.  Its line-up of films and clout are matched only by Sundance’s, and it substitutes balmy 70 degree weather and large, well-appointed theaters for that festival’s snowy winds and converted high school auditoriums and hotel ballrooms.  […]

  STOKER is the kind of swank, elegant horror movie we don’t see very often in these days of unkillable chainsaw-wielding serial killers who make awful use of human remains.  It’s chilling, more than a little crazy, and also borderline silly, all of which are part of the fun. The film is the first English-language project […]

  Like his Oscar-winning A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s THE PAST is concerned with the abyss of uncertainty and mystery that lies under seemingly straightforward actions, the ever-increasing complications that become evident whenever one scrutinizes the events and motives of everyday life. Although the setting this time is Paris, and the characters aren’t the same, in many ways, The […]

  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 PROGRAM feels entirely useless.  With an authoritative documentary about the Lance Armstrong story already in wide distribution (Alex Gibney’s excellent The Armstrong Lie), the only reason to attempt a scripted version of the story would be to offer insights not present in the documentary material, or a cohesive narrative of his life that […]

  PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Annapurna – Oct. 13):  In the hothouse of a film festival, movies that are unrelated inevitably begin to collide with each other in the viewer’s mind.  So it’s difficult, in a festival that’s given us the extraordinary Disobedience, to give similar weight to Angela Robinson’s much frothier and thinner […]