R.I.P.D.:  Not Even For Free – No Life After Death For This One Ryan Reynolds plays a dead man in the new R.I.P.D., and thus it makes sense that his character would be frustrated and depressed for much of its length, but watching him, you almost feel like his glumness is a message to […]

  MANDELA: LONG WALK TO FREEDOM:  Watch It At Home – More Like a Trudge The movies haven’t figured out what to do with Idris Elba.  The powerful, fiery actor has been spectacular on TV, first on The Wire and more recently on Luther, and he’s kicked around as a supporting player in some big-budget […]

  THAT AWKWARD MOMENT:  Watch It At Home – Low-Impact Rom-Com If you heard that a new indie movie featured the stars of the past 2 years’ back-to-back Sundance sensations, Michael B. Jordan from 2013’s Fruitvale Station and Miles Teller from this year’s Whiplash, would you be intrigued? What if Zac Efron was the other […]

  When push came to shove, a choice had to be made between The Birth of A Nation and “the farting corpse movie” (AKA Swiss Army Man), and your faithful narrator has to confess that he went with the former, so apologies for that.  There are other films, as well, that I would have liked […]

  COME SUNDAY (Netflix):  American films that feature religious figures tend to come in two varieties:  the cloying “faith-based” dramas that play quite literally to the choir, and the “edgy” films in which the supposedly pious are revealed to be hypocritical and often evil frauds.  Joshua Marston’s Come Sunday is a rarity, a film that […]

  FORD VS. FERRARI (20th Century Fox/Disney – November 15):  If the Academy decides to award James Mangold’s Ford vs. Ferrari, which is certainly a possibility, it will be able to have some metaphorical cake and eat it too.  FvsF is both a first-rate example of Hollywood corporate entertainment and a story that questions what […]

  THE HUMANS (A24/Showtime – Nov. 24):  There are typically two strategies for adapting a celebrated play about a small number of people in a limited space to the screen.  One is to “open it up,” adding scenes, characters, or at least locations outside the original set.  The other is to lean into the claustrophobia, […]

  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 […]