> Sundance has a thriving Park City At Midnight program that features plenty of high-octane horror movies, but the most unnerving and disturbing film of this year’s festival may have been Craig Zobel’s COMPLIANCE, a low-key drama based (apparently rather closely) on a true story without any hacked-off limbs or hint of the supernatural. In […]

    RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Worth A Ticket:  Simian Power   Although it’s positioned as the last big adventure epic of the summer, for most of its length Rupert Wyatt’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES isn’t really an action movie.  Somewhat surprisingly, while it establishes an alternative mythology […]

    JACK AND JILL:  Not At Any Price – 2 Adam Sandlers is 2 Too Many   Does anyone really expect an Adam Sandler movie to be good anymore?  Seriously, if you put aside his occasional relatively serious efforts (Funny People, Reign Over Me, Spanglish, Punch-Drunk Love, all boxoffice failures), and the occasional passable […]

    THE VOW:  Not Even For Free – Forget About It   This year has brought us a far-fetched, but ultimately moving and deeply romantic story about a couple who have finally gotten together and married after a great deal of turmoil and who then face their greatest challenge of all:  a fluke accident […]

  IT’S A DISASTER:  Worth A Ticket – And They Feel Just (More Or Less) Fine   IT’S A DISASTER is the movie Seeking A Friend For the End of the World aspired, but failed, to be:  a laugh-out-loud, throat-clutching comedy about catastrophe.  Disaster, which premiered at this year’s LA Film Festival, doesn’t yet have […]

Toronto this year provided two notable portraits of teenagers growing up in a time of political turmoil, Olivier Assayas’s SOMETHING IN THE AIR and Sally Potter’s GINGER AND ROSA. Assayas’s film is about the end of the end of a revolution that never happened.  (The French title, Apres Mai, specifically refers to the May 1968 unrest in and around […]

  ZERO DARK THIRTY:  Worth A Ticket – The Year’s Most Gripping Thriller Is True You already know how ZERO DARK THIRTY ends.  You knew how All the President’s Men ended, too, and Apollo 13 and Titanic.  Great drama doesn’t require M. Night Shyamalan-esque surprise endings, or twisty, tricky narrative structure.  Sometimes the most satisfying […]

  It takes quite a while–almost its entire length, in fact–for the utter conventionality of AFTERNOON DELIGHT to become clear.  Jill Soloway’s feature directing debut, for which she unaccountably won a Sundance award, toys with being a much more interesting, transgressive film, before settling down to be as middle-of-the-road and inoffensive as is humanly possible.  […]