> The first substantial buy of the Toronto Film Festival (Shame had sold first, but for art film prices) turned out to be Salmon Fishing In the Yemen, a modestly engaging romantic comedy from Lasse Hallstrom. Hallstrom has made a career out of “modestly engaging,” following his early distinction with My Life As a Dog […]
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 […]
It takes about an hour, but Nicholas McCarthy’s THE PACT, which premiered in the Park City At Midnight section at Sundance, eventually turns out to have a neat twist up its sleeve, one that switches the movie from haunted house horror to an entirely different subgenre of thriller. And after that, a solid reel […]
AMERICAN FICTION (Orion/MGM/Amazon – Nov. 17): The Toronto People’s Choice Award has been something of a golden ticket to a Best Picture nomination over the years, and this year the prize went to Cord Jefferson’s directing debut American Fiction. Jefferson’s script (based on the novel “Erasure” by Percival Everett) for the most part deftly toes […]
THE LONE RANGER: Not Even For Free – The Silver Bullet Is Self-Inflicted Disney’s reluctance to produce THE LONE RANGER is well-documented; the studio even shut down the production shortly before shooting was to begin in order to force producer Jerry Bruckheimer, producer/director Gore Verbinski and producer/star Johnny Depp to slim down the production […]
DESTROYER (Annapurna – Dec. 25): Another fractured-time thriller, this one trickier than most, because the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi features a sort of time-loop within a loop. All that structural fanciness aside, Destroyer is mostly a vehicle for Nicole Kidman’s aggressively deglamorized performance as an end-of-the-line LAPD detective named Erin Bell. […]
DOLEMITE IS MY NAME (Netflix – October 4 in theatres/October 25 streaming): Putting aside his strong dramatic turn in Dreamgirls, it’s been an incredible 20 years, dating back to 1999’s Bowfinger, since Eddie Murphy’s work inspired the kind of joy that typified the first two decades of his career, joy that’s been diminished with […]
MOTHERING SUNDAY (Sony Classics – Nov 19): Eva Husson’s film, adapted by Alice Birch from a Graham Swift novel, has many of the rote trappings of prestige costume drama. We’re back in the English countryside, during the interim between World Wars. Class distinctions are very much at the center of things, as manor-born Paul […]