BAD WORDS:  Watch It At Home – Hilarious, For a While BAD WORDS eventually has to spell out its plot, and that’s when, like many an initially enthusiastic competitor, it fades, becoming increasingly soft and even sentimental.  For a while though, Jason Bateman’s directing debut, from a script by Andrew Dodge, is resolutely, and […]

  THE BRONZE is an entertaining but standard-issue R-rated American comedy, equal parts Bad Teacher and any Danny McBride vehicle, which makes one wonder what it’s doing in the Dramatic Competition line-up at the Sundance Film Festival.  (McBride’s breakout movie The Foot Fist Way also premiered at Sundance, but in the more genre-oriented Midnight section.)  Another similarity to […]

  REBEL IN THE RYE (no distrib):  Danny Strong’s first film as a director is a biography of J. D. Salinger (Nicholas Hoult), and it hits all the Salinger bullet points:  his early struggles to get published, his spectacularly doomed romance with legendary playwright’s daughter Oona O’Neill (he lost her to Charlie Chaplin), his difficult […]

  A STAR IS BORN (Warners – October 5):  Bradley Cooper, making his directing debut, decided to do the equivalent of a first-time weightlifter starting out with a 400-pound barbell.  It isn’t just that A Star Is Born is one of the most iconic Hollywood classics (this is the fifth version, counting What Price Hollywood?, […]

  THE NEST (no distrib):  Sean Durkin’s first feature since 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene presents its emotions with such high-intensity beams that it often feels as though the film is going to slip into the thriller or even horror genre, but it’s actually just a family drama.  Set in the Thatcher-era 1980s, its plot […]

  LIVING (no distrib):  Over the years, there’s periodically been talk about remaking Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece Ikiru, including a rumored updated US version that would have starred Tom Hanks in the lead.  We finally have an English-language Ikiru in the more modest form of Oliver Hermanus’s Living, from a screenplay by the famed novelist […]

  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 […]

  QUEER (A24 – TBD):  Luca Guadagnino has unearthed glamour in the blood-soaked dance troupe/witches’ coven of Suspiria and the cannibal romance of Bones and All, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that his seedy 1950s Mexico City and South America of Queer glistens with swank.  Queer is based (by Justin Kuritzkes, who wrote Guadagnino’s Challengers) […]