A STAR IS BORN (Warners – October 5):  Bradley Cooper, making his directing debut, decided to do the equivalent of a first-time weightlifter starting out with a 400-pound barbell.  It isn’t just that A Star Is Born is one of the most iconic Hollywood classics (this is the fifth version, counting What Price Hollywood?, […]

  WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY (Roku – November 4):  A comic book fantasia of a celebrity “biography,” Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (co-written with Yankovic himself, who’s also one of the producers), takes some fragments about the parody musician’s life and work, and transforms them into a nonstop array of gags that […]

THE WILD ROBOT (DreamWorks Animation/Universal – Sept. 27):  Chris Sanders’s movie is a fairly captivating if unsurprising family entertainment.  In the future, when a plane with a cargo of robots crashes off the coast of an island, the survivor is Rozim 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o)–you can call her Roz.  She’s programmed to aid humans, […]

> Oren Moverman’s first film as a director, The Messenger, was a beautifully contained, emotionally detailed story about soldiers assigned to deliver tragic news to the families of the deceased.  In his new film RAMPART, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Moverman is more ambitious and, unfortunately, a victim of the sophomore jinx. This […]

  With The Silver-Linings Playbook and now Wayne Blair’s THE SAPPHIRES, Harvey Weinstein may have the feel-good part of the coming awards season locked down.  This slight but charming true story (or at least “inspired by” one) about an Australian singing group is like the happytime version of Dreamgirls. The story is set in 1968 Australia, a time when, […]

  THE JUDGE (Warners) – Opens October 10 – Watch It At Home Since the first Iron Man opened, Robert Downey Jr. has been one of the world’s biggest (and wealthiest) stars.  But he hasn’t used his superpowers for good:  in the 6 years that have followed, he’s interspersed Tony Stark extravaganzas only with entries […]

  SNOWDEN (Open Road – Sept 16):  Oliver Stone’s return to politically-charged biography is subdued by the standards of his Nixon or W.  It’s a hagiography that follows the character arc of his Born of the Fourth of July (true believer finds his ideals crushed by political reality and transforms into a revolutionary agent against […]

  MARRIAGE STORY (Netflix – November 6 in theatres/December 6 streaming):  A film doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be great.  There may be no subjects more intensively depicted in movies and on television than marital break-ups and the miseries of divorce, yet Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is so fully realized and brilliantly performed that […]