>SHOWBUZZDAILY will be at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and today TIFF announced the first group of movies being screened (there are plenty more to come over the next few weeks).  Here’s the full list, and some titles worthy of initial enthusiasm: GALAS ALBERT NOBBS:  Oscar Bait Alert, with Glenn Close as a […]

> EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE:  Worth A Ticket –  Earns Its Tears If EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE accomplishes nothing else–and it actually accomplishes quite a bit–it’s served to let us know exactly where the third rail of current American popular culture is located.  It’s not every day that the august NY Times informs […]

  THE TWILIGHT SAGA:  BREAKING DAWN PART 2:  Watch It At Home – Fangless Eternal Love, For the Last Time Even for those of us decidedly not devotees of the TWILIGHT saga, there are some things to be said for BREAKING DAWN PART 2, beyond the obvious one that it marks the last time we’ll […]

> Watch It At Home:  Scrupulously accurate, to a fault. In an era that so recently gave us “The Kennedys,” possibly the worst piece of pop culture history ever produced for American television, it seems downright rude to criticize Robert Redford’s new film THE CONSPIRATOR for sticking to the facts.  Accuracy and drama, however, are […]

  PARENTAL GUIDANCE – Not At Any Price – Stupefying “Family” Sitcom Too Little For the Big Screen This is said with all due respect to a pair of performers who have entertained millions for decades, but really, don’t celebrities ever look in the mirror?  If not, don’t they have people to look in the […]

  THE MAGNIFICENT 7 (Village Roadshow/MGM/Columbia/Sony – Sept 23):  Cinema survived in 1960 when Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai was transformed into an American western, and it will survive this new adequate but uninspired remake of the remake.  Despite a script co-credited to True Detective‘s Nik Pizzolatto (with Richard Wenk), and a promising match-up […]

  THE GREAT GATSBY:  Watch It At Home – Moulin Gatsby Just for fun, let’s try to think of a worse match of filmmaker and material than Baz Luhrmann and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY.  Judd Apatow’s Macbeth?  Woody Allen’s Lord of the Rings?  Michael Bay’s Remembrance of Things Past?  Jean-Luc Godard’s Shrek?  (Although […]

> Amid multiplying online reports, spearheaded by New York Magazine’s Vulture site, that Paramount’s SUPER 8 is tracking for a very soft opening this weekend at the box-office, the studio has decided to launch a “secret” (by which I mean “highly publicized“) pre-opening day:  the movie will now screen on Thursday in about 325 theaters […]