THE FATHER (Sony Classics – TBD):  It’s probably foolhardy to start making predictions about next year’s Oscars when this year’s haven’t even been handed out yet, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Father won’t be a major part of the Best Actor conversation.  It’s a showcase role, […]

  RYE LANE (Searchlight/Disney – March 31):  Raine Allen Miller’s feature debut Rye Lane is a bubbly surprise, a quick-witted, fast-paced rom-com overflowing with charm.  The script by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia wastes no time launching its premise, as Yas (Vivian Oparah) hears Dom (David Jonsson) weeping in a unisex toilet stall at a […]

  There are any number of ways the story of Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat could be told to make a potentially fascinating movie, from the sociological to the political, the personal to the satiric.  The laziest–one might even say the most cowardly–would be to simply repeat the events as they were originally presented to the public […]

  Back when Stanley Kubrick still planned to direct the film that became AI: Artificial Intelligence, he famously toyed with the idea of shooting it bit by bit over a period of years, so that the young protagonist would literally age on screen.  Now Richard Linklater, the most unKubrickian of filmmakers, has done exactly that with BOYHOOD, […]

  DAMSEL (no distrib):  A hipster representation of comedy rather than anything comic itself.  Written and directed by David and Nathan Zellner, whose previous work includes the similarly film festival-targeted Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (they also appear in the film, David in a leading role), Damsel initially presents itself as the tall tale of Samuel […]

  FIRST DATE:  Your regard for First Date is likely to directly relate to your nostalgia for the low-rent action comedies and Tarantino imitations of the 1990s and 2000s.  Those comedies were marked by idiot plots that piled on coincidences to justify rampant bloodshed, while no pseudo-Tarantino script would be complete without garrulous gangsters monologuing […]

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING (A24 – March 8):  Rose Glass has followed her brilliant horror movie Saint Maud by exchanging austerity for pulp.  Love Lies Bleeding (co-written with Weronika Tofilska) is engulfed by the spirit of overripeness, to the point where it embraces the garish and even tbe flat-out ludicrous.  The film doesn’t entirely work, […]

> The fundamental problem with LAY THE FAVORITE, Stephen Frears’ new film that premiered last night at Sundance, is that it’s made by people who seem to have little if any interest in gambling. And since this is a movie about the thrill and especially the business of gambling, that means they don’t have any […]