Stuart Blumberg’s first film as a director (his screenwriting credits include The Kids Are All Right), THANKS FOR SHARING, never quite manages to solve its own central problem:  how to make a sensitive and funny (and not harrowing) movie on the subject of sex addiction. We’ve had the harrowing version, of course, with Steve McQueen’s […]

  As a movie year, 2013 was awfully slow in getting started.  Hardly anything worth remembering opened all winter and spring–only 1 movie in the Top 10 below opened in theatres before late May.  Summer brought some relief, and then the film festival season that began at the end of August opened the doors wide […]

  HUSTLERS (STX – September 13):  Lorena Scafaria becomes the latest filmmaker failing to ascend Martin Scorsese Mountain.  Her Hustlers wants to be Goodfellas in its marrow, not only in its based-on-a-true-story tale of New York criminals who ride high and then go down, but in its structure of interspersing dispassionate after-the-fact narration with the […]

With the notable exception of Friday Night Lights, Hollywood has rarely even attempted a serious depiction of life in the American heartland in recent years.  More often, the center of the country is a setting for stories of random violence or bland, heartwarming family values.  In his fourth feature film, AT ANY PRICE, director Ramin Bahrani, […]

  Events on the same-sex rights front have moved so quickly that FREEHELD, which is based on a true story from 2007, and has been in development almost since it occurred, now feels like something of a history story.  Not completely, of course–as the current situation of the Kentucky clerk who won’t issue marriage licenses […]

  One of the things that happens at film festivals is that as you see many films in back-to-back proximity, mini-trends start to emerge, at least in the mind, and pictures that were made entirely separately, and which may well end up released months apart from each other, seem to be in direct competition.  So […]

  Transgender issues have been such hot-button topics in the news lately that people may not be prepared for how muted and delicate Tom Hooper’s THE DANISH GIRL is.  The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival and then screened at Toronto, before beginning a quest for awards later in the year, barely deals […]

  mother! (Paramount – Sept 15):  It may come as a shock to people who have been following the marketing for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! to find out that it isn’t a horror movie at all.  It uses thriller grammar from time to time, and in the early going you might think you’re going to see […]