A week at the Toronto Film Festival added up to 24 screenings–a decent pace, but not an outstanding one.  Blame some vagaries of the festival’s scheduling, and a baseline decision that Midnight Madness was too much midnight and maybe even too much madness.  The potential awards contenders I wasn’t able to get to included […]

  CASUAL:  October 7 on Hulu Hulu has included some original programming in its inventory for a while now, but it’s signaled its intention to join Netflix and Amazon in that realm in a more serious way with its order of new Mindy Project episodes, and production of a Stephen King minseries, The Way from […]

  Despite its compact scale, Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel ROOM was a daunting candidate for film adaptation, because so much of its impact depends on its very specific narrator’s voice, a 5-year old named Jack who has lived his entire life in the shed where his Ma (whose other name is Joy) was taken captive […]

  Scott Cooper’s BLACK MASS is a beautifully put together and wonderfully acted true-life drama about Boston gangsters and the law, but it has a void at its center that holds it back from greatness.  That center isn’t occupied by JoOut ofhnny Depp or his character James “Whitey” Bulger (one used that nickname with him […]

  Awards season is Darwinian, often placing two titles in direct competition that have only general traits in common.  Last year we had the British biographies The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, which might have canceled each other out in the end.  This year brings two excellent stories about journalism, Truth and now […]

  HEROES REBORN:  Thursday 8PM on NBC, starting September 24   This year, for the first time, the Toronto Film Festival has included a slate of television productions from around the world in its line-up, formalizing the degree to which the status of TV has changed in the last few years.  That’s completely logical.  What […]

  Sadly, the phrase “BEING CHARLIE is Rob Reiner’s best film in years” doesn’t mean nearly as much as it once would have.  After a decade where he could do no wrong, he has, incredibly enough, been in the Hollywood wilderness for twenty years now, churning out flops like The Story of Us, Alex and […]

  Lorene Scafaria’s THE MEDDLER spins its way past so many potential crash sites that it’s practically an example of cinematic stunt-driving.  The premise itself is something out of a thousand terrible sitcoms:  the widowed mom of the title, Marnie (Susan Sarandon), is so desperate to micro-manage her daughter’s life that she moves from New […]