> DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions.  On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you’ve chosen.  If you do it right, you have […]

  THE SHROUDS (no distrib):  At age 81, David Cronenberg’s fascination with the malignant possibilities of the human body, and with the fiendish manipulation of same, still knows no bounds.  The Shrouds begins with the premise of a cemetery in which the bodies of the decomposing dead are wrapped in electronic swaddling that enables mourners to watch […]

> The Toronto Film Festival has announced its second helping of titles for next month’s worldwide gathering of film professionals and fanatics.  These may be less star-studded than the last group of films announced, but there are still quite a few intriguing titles.  As part of our continuing coverage of the movie awards season that, […]

> As has been reported, there really was an ambulance outside the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto after the midnight premiere of Alexandre Courtes’ THE INCIDENT, there to rescue at least one person who had fainted during the movie.  Of course, this may just mean that Toronto Film Festival patrons have delicate sensibilities–an idea supported by […]

  MEGALOPOLIS (American Zoetrope/Lionsgate – Sept. 27):  Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited, much-discussed return to epic filmmaking, self-financed to the tune of $125M+ (he’s paying for the marketing as well as the production) is, alas, a hapless failure in every way.  Its fatuous pretentiousness might be excusable if it were a dazzling piece of cinema, but it […]

  David Ayer’s END OF WATCH brings a new wrinkle to the “found-footage” genre by using it in a cop movie.  LAPD Officer Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) wires a camera to his uniform, and constantly photographs what’s going on while he’s on the beat, supposedly to generate footage for a documentary he wants to put […]

  THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING (Focus/Universal) – Opens November 7  – Worth A Ticket There’s a benefit but also a burden to being clear-cut “Oscar bait.”  At this point we all know the kinds of movies the Academy looks upon with favor:  serious biographies, period pieces, leading actors who contort themselves in one way or […]

  PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9):  Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation.  Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, which came to be known as “Peterloo” because the bloodshed was likened to the then-recent […]