VERY GOOD GIRLS is set in contemporary Brooklyn, but it’s shot (by Bobby Bukowski) with the kind of gauzy glow that suggests a European perfume commercial.  It’s lovely to look at, but also mystifying and ultimately annoying, and that describes the movie too. Naomi Foner, who wrote and directed the film, makes her directing debut […]

  EVIL DEAD:  Watch It At Home – Plenty of Icky, Not So Much Scary A slick, Hollywood-budgeted remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 EVIL DEAD (actually there was a ‘the” in front of that one, the definite article having been misplaced over the decades) is sort of a contradiction in terms.  The whole appeal of […]

  The prevailing atmosphere in Denis Villenueve’s PRISONERS will be familiar to anyone who’s been watching cable TV drama for the past few years.  Gloom, grief, hopelessness, helpless rage–it’s home turf for shows like The Killing, The Bridge, Low Winter Sun, Broadchurch and their brethren.  (The rural Pennsylvania setting of Prisoners has even borrowed the endless raininess of The Killing‘s Seattle.) […]

  Star power makes all the difference  in THE SKELETON TWINS.  Craig Johnson’s dramedy (written with Mark Heyman) takes place in fairly commonplace territory, especially at Sundance:  siblings bound together, whether they like it or not, by embittered love and old family scars.  What isn’t expected, though, is for those roles to be filled by SNL alumni Kristen […]

  WINTER’S TALE:  Not Even For Free – 2 Hours of Thin Tinsel The new movie WINTER’S TALE makes one ponder the phrase “labor of love.”  It marks the feature directing debut of the enormously successful writer/producer Akiva Goldsman, whose films include A Time To Kill, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Hancock, The Da Vinci […]

  BIRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance):  Worth A Ticket – A Stunt, But An Amazing One Alejandro G. Inarritu’s BIRDMAN is, like this year’s Boyhood, a film defined by its form.  In the case of Boyhood, that form was inextricable from its content:  its depiction of the passage of time, and the experience […]

  JACKIE (Fox Searchlight – December 9):  The most impressive film of the festival thus far is director Pablo Larrain’s jewel-like examination of the realities and artifices behind our perceptions of history, viewed through the prism of Jackie Kennedy, who is played by Natalie Portman in a performance that goes beyond (brilliant) impersonation to deliver […]

There are certain inevitabilities at Sundance, apart from snow:  something will go wrong (after I waited on line for 2 hours on opening day, the box office discovered that it had lost one of my passes), and no matter how carefully one chooses one’s film selections, some of the hottest titles will be missed.  For […]