THE CHILDREN ACT (no distrib):  It’s not intended as disparagement to Ian McEwan’s novel and screenplay adaptation, or to Richard Eyre’s film, that THE CHILDREN ACT feels much of the time like it could be the pilot for a high-toned television series featuring Emma Thompson as a compassionate jurist specializing in family law who […]

  The screenplay for THE SPECTACULAR NOW, a Dramatic Competition entry at Sundance, was written by the team of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who also wrote (500) Days of Summer, but the new film has none of the breezy and somewhat gimmicky visual style of that hit.  Director James Ponsoldt, instead, goes to the […]

  IN THE EARTH (Neon):  After his foray into more commercial cinema with the Netflix remake of Rebecca that didn’t go very well, Ben Wheatley has returned to the stranger and more experimental style of his earlier films like Kill List and High Rise with In the Earth.  It’s not an easy movie to describe […]

  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 […]

> There’s a principled discussion to be had about whether the Sundance Film Festival should be featuring movies that are essentially low-budget Hollywood entertainments made outside the studio system. But that discussion fades into irrelevance when the result is as hilarious and accomplished as FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL…, which premiered tonight. Directed by first-time […]

  Of all the films in this year’s US Dramatic Competition at Sundance, Kat Candler’s HELLION was the one that most closely matched what’s become a festival template: Aggressively shaky handheld camerawork:  Check. Small-town dysfunctional family (alcoholic/grief-stricken division):  Check. Third act sparked by violence:  Check. Rebellious yet sensitive and misunderstood young protagonist:  Check. Commercially successful […]

  MAGAZINE DREAMS:  The hype was accurate:  Jonathan Majors gives a titanic performance in Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams.  Playing Killian, a roided-up amateur bodybuilder obsessed with achieving glory in that profession, Majors somehow manages to be both massive and delicate, prone to rage but also abjectly needy for acceptance or connection.  Majors never misjudges the […]

  The director Denis Villenueve has been staking out some interesting Hollywood territory for himself.  His new SICARIO, which debuted at Cannes and screened at the Toronto Film Festival prior to arriving in theatres next week, is, like his previous Prisoners, a serious adult thriller that demands audience attention and doesn’t compromise its dramatic principles, […]