A REAL PAIN (Searchlight/Disney – TBD):  David (Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins born just months apart and raised in close companionship.  Over the years, though, they’ve drifted apart.  Partly it’s because David remained in New York City, where he has a mundane but successful job selling […]

  A KID LIKE JAKE (no distrib):  Silas Howard’s dramedy is a small-scale triumph, successfully navigating its way from a wry account of upper-middle-class Brooklynites Alex and Greg (Claire Danes and Jim Parsons) trying to get their 4-year old into private school, into a wrenching story of the family being pulled apart as Jake’s behavior […]

  DON’T WORRY, HE WON’T GET FAR ON FOOT (Amazon):  Despite some Christopher Nolan-esque splintering of time, Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot is one of his more conventional films.  Van Sant wrote the script himself, after years of development (originally, Robin Williams was to be the star) that resulted […]

  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 […]

  THE FIRST TIME may be too lovable for its own good.  Jonathan Kasdan’s teen romance, which premiered in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance, couldn’t be more straightforward:  in its opening minutes, it introduces the adorable Dave (Dylan O’Brien) and Aubrey (Britt Robertson), two hyper-articulate sweethearts who meet outside a suburban LA party neither of […]

> Or if the title were a Jeopardy answer, the question would be: what should writer/director Rodrigo Cortes have paid attention to, before he typed “The End” on his script Red Lights wouldn’t have been a festival movie even if it had been good. It’s no more than high-grade hokum (and not that high), and […]

  Damien Chazelle’s powerhouse WHIPLASH is about the pursuit of not just excellence, but perfection, and on its own deliberately limited terms it doesn’t land far from that mark.  Whiplash won both the Grand Jury and the Audience prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (only the 5th time that’s happened), and for all intents […]

  The title ZIPPER suggests something wittier and more enticing than Mora Stephens’ well-made melodrama turns out to be.  If a filmmaker is determined to reexamine the familiar story of a politician who can’t control his own personal excesses, some kind of new take or distinctive angle is advisable, but Stephens and her co-writer Joel Viertel […]