> Watch It At Home:  Petty larceny. Sometimes casting can be too good:  Keanu Reeves playing a guy who pretty much sleepwalks through his own life is practically redundant.  His whole style, from the very start of his career in the Bill and Ted pictures (more than 20 years ago!), has been to lag a […]

> When the announcement was made that Warner Bros would split HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS into 2 full-length movies, there was a certain amount of cynicism about studio greed–and, indeed, why not pick up an extra billion or so if the opportunity arises?  But really, J.K. Rowling’s novels have all been stuffed so […]

> Jim Field Smith’s comedy BUTTER, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, ambitiously makes a play for both the heartwarming indie Little Miss Sunshine audience and the satire-minded Election crowd.  That may be one play too many, but the movie is worth seeing anyway. Jason A Micallef’s first produced script is set in the […]

    Worth a ticket.   In movies, as in life, when someone is offered an illicit miracle drug that seems too good to be true, it usually is. So the general narrative arc of LIMITLESS doesn’t come as a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Neil Burger’s film, predicted to be the highest […]

  DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK – Not Even For Free:  No, Really–Don’t Be Afraid     FilmDistrict has gone out of its way to identify co-writer/co-producer Guillermo del Toro with DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK, to the extent that from the marketing, one could easily fail to realize that the movie is […]

  TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY:  Worth A Ticket – An Epic of Betrayals   John LeCarre is (I guess one should say “arguably”) the greatest of all spy novelists, and his 1974 TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY is “arguably” his finest work.  Incredibly, the 1979 BBC miniseries adaptation lived up to the level of the novel, […]

      SILENT HOUSE:  Watch It At Home – A Curiosity   SILENT HOUSE isn’t the first feature-length film to provide the illusion that it’s all been shot in a single continuous take.  The most famous was Hitchcock’s Rope, but in his era, it was technologically impossible to actually shoot for 90 minutes straight, […]

  And then this happened. With BATMAN & ROBIN, the franchise that had been reclaimed for adults by Tim Burton in 1989 was turned back over to children (and not bright children) by Joel Schumacher in 1997.  Schumacher took everything he’d done in Batman Forever and turned it up, as they say, to 11.  He […]