LATE NIGHT (Amazon):  It’s legitimate to note that the thoroughly mainstream and commercial Late Night belonged at Sundance just about as much as The Devil Wears Prada would have, since to a large extent it transposes Prada from fashion to the world of late-night talk shows.  The festival’s decision to host Late Night (which paid […]

    CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER – Worth A Ticket:  Marvel Goes Back To the Future   There’s a certain irony in the fact that, in this summer of Super 8 and its Spielberg rapture, the most successfully Spielbergian movie of the season is Marvel’s CAPTAIN AMERICA:  THE FIRST AVENGER.  Its connection to Steven […]

  STUDIO 54 (no distrib):  Matt Tynauer’s documentary covers all the bases of the disco that defined nightlife for a surprisingly brief time in the late 1970s, from the club’s construction on the site of an old CBS TV studio, to its “no bridge and tunnel” door policy (even though co-owners Steve Rubell and Ian […]

  SNOWDEN (Open Road – Sept 16):  Oliver Stone’s return to politically-charged biography is subdued by the standards of his Nixon or W.  It’s a hagiography that follows the character arc of his Born of the Fourth of July (true believer finds his ideals crushed by political reality and transforms into a revolutionary agent against […]

  KILLING THEM SOFTLY:  Watch It At Home – Low-Rent Gangsters and A Study In American Existentialism Andrew Dominik’s talents as a filmmaker are matched only by his pretentions.  Dominik’s first film was the Australian Chopper, which introduced Eric Bana to the world, but he’s better known for his mournful The Assassination of Jesse James […]

  In recent years, the… let’s call it mature audience has been a profitable one, making moderate hits of films like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet.  This holiday season, the title of choice for this niche is likely to be PHILOMENA, a literate tearjerker that Harvey Weinstein unveiled at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Based on a true […]

  IN THE EARTH (Neon):  After his foray into more commercial cinema with the Netflix remake of Rebecca that didn’t go very well, Ben Wheatley has returned to the stranger and more experimental style of his earlier films like Kill List and High Rise with In the Earth.  It’s not an easy movie to describe […]

  These haven’t been glory days for the Toronto Film Festival.  The WGA/SAG strikes dampened the vibe, of course–of the 27 films I saw at TIFF, only 4 screenings featured appearances from the cast.  Beyond that, for whatever reasons, TIFF also wasn’t favored by the studios with some of the major releases that instead opted […]