PAIN AND GAIN:  Watch It At Home – Michael Bay On a Small Scale is Still Michael Bay There’s an almost meta strain that runs through Michael Bay’s PAIN AND GAIN, and you have to wonder, watching it, how much Bay was conscious of the fact that his customary musclebound, bloated, meatheaded style of […]

  The writer Peter Morgan is a whiz at boring into little-remembered (and in the US, sometimes little-known) crannies of recent history and scooping out the rich drama inside, with scripts like The Deal, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United to his credit, along with the more celebrated The Queen.  (His occasional forays into pure fiction […]

  VERONICA MARS:  Watch It At Home – Still a TV Show, For Better and Worse It was probably impossible for the movie of VERONICA MARS to live up to the story of how it came to be made.  That’s an epic, decade-long saga, which began when the TV series, critically praised but never a […]

  The title ZIPPER suggests something wittier and more enticing than Mora Stephens’ well-made melodrama turns out to be.  If a filmmaker is determined to reexamine the familiar story of a politician who can’t control his own personal excesses, some kind of new take or distinctive angle is advisable, but Stephens and her co-writer Joel Viertel […]

  SIDNEY HALL (no distrib):  Shawn Christensen’s literary drama (written with Jason Dolan) is initially engaging as a modern-day sort of J.D. Salinger story, told simultaneously across three time periods, with Sidney Hall (Logan Lerman throughout) presented as an arrogant but troubled teen, an acclaimed novelist, and a middle-aged man who’s run away from the […]

  ROMA (Netflix – Dec. 14):  Alfonso Cuaron is one of the master filmmakers of this era, and Roma confirms that all over again.  It’s a deceptively simple memory piece, a semi-autobiographical story set in the Mexico City of his youth in 1970-71, with most of the action revolving around an upper-middle-class family with three […]

  THE FATHER (Sony Classics – TBD):  It’s probably foolhardy to start making predictions about next year’s Oscars when this year’s haven’t even been handed out yet, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Father won’t be a major part of the Best Actor conversation.  It’s a showcase role, […]

  NANNY (no distrib):  Think Netflix’s Maid, but as a (sort of) horror movie.  Aisha (Anna Diop) is an undocumented Senegalese immigrant in New York who works as a nanny for the daughter of a well-off couple, Amy (Michelle Monaghan) and Adam (Morgan Spector), in order to earn money she can send to her young […]