The trouble with trying to recommend THE ONE I LOVE , written by Justin Lader and directed by Charlie McDowell, is that it’s impossible to describe how clever, surprising and intriguing it turns out to be without giving up its secrets.  It begins straightforwardly–so much so, in fact, that you might need to restrain an “Ah, […]

  As a movie year, 2013 was awfully slow in getting started.  Hardly anything worth remembering opened all winter and spring–only 1 movie in the Top 10 below opened in theatres before late May.  Summer brought some relief, and then the film festival season that began at the end of August opened the doors wide […]

  THE WAY, WAY BACK:  Watch It At Home – Modestly Engaging Coming-Of-Age Tale THE WAY, WAY BACK is one of the last real indie hopes for a original breakout hit this summer (it was a big buy out of Sundance, a $10M purchase by Fox Searchlight, the studio behind the Sundance smash Little Miss […]

  UPSTREAM COLOR:  Worth A Ticket – But Not If You Require Coherent Plotting I’d be lying if I said I really knew what the hell was going on in UPSTREAM COLOR, and yet the experience of watching it was surprisingly enjoyable, even gripping in an odd way.  Watching Shane Carruth’s film (he serves as […]

  The old truism that Park City empties out during the second half of the Sundance Film Festival, making it possible to see all the hot titles that premiered at the festival’s start, is far less true than it used to be.  It was impossible to get into the festival’s big buy, The Way, Way […]

It’s a cliche to say, when a director of commercials and music videos helms his or her first feature film, that the result resembles a video extended to feature length–and certainly not one that’s always true, as the debuts of, among others, Ridley Scott (The Duellists) and David Fincher (Alien 3) have shown.  But cliches […]

  Toy’s House wasn’t the only movie at this year’s Sundance about boys fending for themselves.  THE INEVITABLE DEFEAT OF MISTER AND PETE depicts a less voluntary version of the effort to keep going without adults, set in a much more hostile environment.  George Tillman Jr’s film, written by Michael Starrbury, is set in a […]

  It just wouldn’t be a film festival without something from Michael Winterbottom.  Winterbottom isn’t at the very top of the film director pantheon, but he’s respected enough that his projects have been in near-constant festival demand for most of his two decade-long career, and one way or another they tend to be included in […]