THE HUMANS (A24/Showtime – Nov. 24):  There are typically two strategies for adapting a celebrated play about a small number of people in a limited space to the screen.  One is to “open it up,” adding scenes, characters, or at least locations outside the original set.  The other is to lean into the claustrophobia, […]

> If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he’d had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler’s concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets […]

  It isn’t often that one needs to invoke Intolerance to describe a current film, but CLOUD ATLAS demands it.  Like D.W. Griffith’s epic, it intercuts between stories taking place across hundreds of years of human experience–in this case, from the 19th to the 23rd centuries–in order to tell a larger, inspirational story about destiny and freedom.  Although […]

  If there were no credits on the new comedy-drama YOU ARE HERE, it would almost be inconceivable that an audience member would imagine it coming from the typewriter of Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men.  It’s not that You Are Here is unwatchably terrible, but that it’s merely OK in a familiar and hackneyed way that’s the […]

  Lorene Scafaria’s THE MEDDLER spins its way past so many potential crash sites that it’s practically an example of cinematic stunt-driving.  The premise itself is something out of a thousand terrible sitcoms:  the widowed mom of the title, Marnie (Susan Sarandon), is so desperate to micro-manage her daughter’s life that she moves from New […]

  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 […]

  BROS (Universal – Sept. 30):  Notwithstanding its occasional meta self-deprecation, it’s clear that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner (both writer/producers and respectively director and star) want Bros to be Hollywood’s first mainstream big-screen gay rom-com hit.  It’s fitting in a way, then, that like so many straight rom-coms before it, Bros suffers from third […]

> One of the enduring questions of Madonna’s illustrious quarter-century career is how someone so brilliant in managing every other facet of her persona has consistently made such terrible decisions when it comes to movies.  It’s the one medium where she’s never succeeded, and even when she’s occasionally done something right, she instantly follows it […]