THE IMPOSSIBLE – Worth A Ticket – A Tsunami Film With Both Spectacle and Emotion Director Juan Antonio Bayona has done a spectacular job of re-creating the 2004 Asian tsunami in THE IMPOSSIBLE. Staged mostly in studio tanks with added CG imagery, the 10-minute long sequence puts Clint Eastwood’s version of the disaster in Hereafter […]

  THE LAST OF ROBIN HOOD is an odd miss, a sliver of movie history that seems to have all the right elements but never quite jells.  The title refers to Errol Flynn, legendary swashbuckling star of The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, The Dawn Patrol and many other classic Hollywood adventures, and it’s hard to […]

  Despite its compact scale, Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel ROOM was a daunting candidate for film adaptation, because so much of its impact depends on its very specific narrator’s voice, a 5-year old named Jack who has lived his entire life in the shed where his Ma (whose other name is Joy) was taken captive […]

  JUST MERCY (Warners – December 25):  As the release date suggests, this is a straight-down-the-middle Oscar play, and it may have some success in that arena (although Warners will also be campaigning for The Goldfinch and Joker).  Destin Daniel Cretton’s film, co-written with Andrew Lanham, belongs to the Innocent Man On Death Row subgenre, […]

  GLASS ONION (Netflix – November 4 in theaters, December 23 online):  After Rian Johnson’s Knives Out broke through to become one of the increasingly few non-IP-based mainstream hits in the market ($311.6M worldwide), Netflix moved aggressively to buy out the franchise, reportedly paying $450M for the next 2 crime-solving adventures of detective Benoit Blanc […]

> When the inevitable US remake of the French thriller SLEEPLESS NIGHT arrives, it’ll benefit from some sharper dialogue (assuming the subtitles in Toronto were fully translating the original), a bit more characterization and a slightly more varied tone.  But the framework already exists for a solid action hit. The picture begins as a variant […]

At this point in movie history, it’s beside the point to ask why we even need a new film version of GREAT EXPECTATIONS when David Lean’s 1946 masterpiece still exists.  (And for those who want a different slant on the story, there’s Alfonso Cuaron’s 1998 modern-day revamp.)  The industry feeds itself on a diet of […]

  KODACHROME (no distrib):  AKA that page of the indie movie playbook marked “Dysfunctional Family Road Trip To Redemption.”  Jonathan Tropper (This Is Where I Leave You) wrote the script, and it has his novels’ mix of damaged-man soap and rom-com.  This one features a dying dad (Ed Harris), who has the kind of incurable […]