BOY ERASED (Focus/Universal – November 2):  Joel Edgerton’s film is the second of the year concerning gay conversion therapy, and its tone is far more conventional than The Miseducation of Cameron Post.  Lucas Hedges plays Jared Eamons (this is a fictionalized version of a true story), son of southern pastor Marshall (Russell Crowe) and […]

  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 […]

  Kate Barker-Froyland’s directing debut SONG ONE is so wispy and insubstantial that the bytes making up its digital images seem barely capable of adhering to a screen.  Clearly influenced by John Carney’s mini-musical Once, it makes Carney’s film look like an Andrew Lloyd-Webber spectacle by comparison. Barker-Froyland also wrote the minimal script, which almost exhausts its resources […]

  IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE (Netflix – TBD):  The biggest sale of the festival as of this writing–a $17M paycheck from Netflix–was its most dynamite entertainment.  Greg Jardin’s feature writing/directing debut feels like Bodies Bodies Bodies was given an injection of The Last of Sheila‘s brains.  Note:  Jardin has asked that his central plot mechanism not be spoiled, which […]

> TEN YEAR, which premiered tonight at the Toronto Film Festival, is one of the few festival movies that has the feel of a potential hit.  This is because, apart from its hugely engaging cast and, to be sure, some effective writing and directing, it’s really not a “film festival” movie at all, but a […]

> Sundance changed the way it kicks things off this year. Instead of a single high-profile Opening Night Film (which has almost always turned out to be a disappointment), the festival screened several smaller films. For those of us who arrived before the madness begins in earnest tomorrow, there was the chance to get Wait […]

  22 JULY (Netflix – October 10):  So many terrible things have happened in the world since July 22, 2011 that at least in the US, few even remember the horrific events that occurred in Oslo, Norway that day, when a single right-wing fanatic named Andres Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people, most of them […]

  WOMEN TALKING (UA/MGM/Amazon – December 9):  In an insular Mennonite community, the woman have always believed what the men told them, that when they awake to discover evidence of sexual assault and thereafter sometimes pregnancy, those were the result of attacks by evil spirits and ghosts.  When the story of Women Talking begins, they’ve […]