SAVE YOURSELVES! (no distrib):  A moderately amusing sketch that doesn’t quite have the heft for feature length.  Writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson satirize Brooklyn hipsters and sci-fi in their story of a couple, Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani), who’ve decided to ditch their devices and spend a week in a […]

It’s a cliche to say, when a director of commercials and music videos helms his or her first feature film, that the result resembles a video extended to feature length–and certainly not one that’s always true, as the debuts of, among others, Ridley Scott (The Duellists) and David Fincher (Alien 3) have shown.  But cliches […]

> If you were going to describe the films of Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The House of Mirth) in one word, that word would not be “dynamic.”  Or “kinetic.”  Or, well, “exciting.”  Davies directs stately tableaux, impressive and sometimes moving, but rooted in nostalgia and regret. Which is why […]

  MISSION:  IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL:  Worth A Ticket – Routine But Spectacular   With MISSION:   IMPOSSIBLE – GHOST PROTOCOL, Brad Bird makes the very unusual transition from animation auteur to live-action director.   Of course, since his animated work includes The Incredibles, one of the snazziest and smartest action-adventures of recent years, the leap […]

  THE MONUMENTS MEN:  Watch It At Home – George Clooney’s Film Is No Classic Work of Art George Clooney’s THE MONUMENTS MEN is a startlingly complete failure.  It’s Clooney’s fifth film behind the camera (after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads, and The Ides of March), but it’s the […]

> WANDERLUST:  Watch It At Home – Hippy Jokes Thawed Out From 1966 The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in light comedy but […]

  In a generally depressed indie film market, Netflix shelled out a reported $20M at Sundance for Chloe Domont’s feature writing/directing debut FAIR PLAY.  The splurge made sense:  Fair Play has that combination of strong storytelling and hot-button ideas on its mind that should allow it to temporarily take over the internet when it launches […]

DREDD, which kicked off the merrily disreputable Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival last night, isn’t much, but no one can say the director Pete Travis wasted his 3D budget. Things are constantly hovering, fluttering or–often–splattering in the foreground of the frame, and the images do a better job of suggesting visual depth […]