G.I. JOE: RETALIATION:  Not Even For Free – Endlessly Dumb Exercise In Boom-Boom Action There’s a difference between making a movie for 11-year old boys and having a script that seems to have been written by one.  (Or in this case by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, doing a faithful imitation of one.)  Idiocy […]

  THE WOLVERINE:  Watch It At Home – The Clawed Superhero’s Latest is Distinctive But Unthrilling THE WOLVERINE, wanting to be both more and less than a typical superhero spectacle, demonstrates the perils of messing with the formula.  James Mangold’s film, with a script credited to Mark Bomback and Scott Frank, has the worthy aim […]

  THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY:  Buy A Ticket – Ben Stiller’s Imaginative, Flawed Reboot Of The Classic Tale The movies Ben Stiller directs for himself (Reality Bites, Zoolander, Tropic Thunder) are nearly always more interesting than the product he churns out as an actor (the Night At the Museum franchise, the Meet the […]

  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 […]

  THE LAST 5 YEARS (Radius/Weinstein) – release date currently unscheduled – Worth A Ticket Richard LaGravenese’s  film version of Jason Robert Brown’s THE LAST 5 YEARS, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and was acquired for release by the Radius division of the Weinstein Company, is a must-see for anyone who loves musicals–and very […]

  COLOSSAL (no distrib):  Well, you haven’t seen this take on sci-fi spectacles before.  In Nacho Vigalondo’s whatzit, party girl Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and her hometown friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) discover that they can cause their actions to be mirrored by a giant sea monster and robot terrorizing Seoul.  In other words, if one of […]

  A KID LIKE JAKE (no distrib):  Silas Howard’s dramedy is a small-scale triumph, successfully navigating its way from a wry account of upper-middle-class Brooklynites Alex and Greg (Claire Danes and Jim Parsons) trying to get their 4-year old into private school, into a wrenching story of the family being pulled apart as Jake’s behavior […]

  THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release):  The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage.  A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened.  That makes The Eyes of […]