42:  Watch It At Home – The Hallmark Baseball Hall of Fame It may well be that 42 is the Jackie Robinson movie audiences want.  It’s a straightforward, handsomely-produced, inspirational telling of a genuinely uplifting story, the 1946-47 baseball seasons when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) broke the color line in American baseball, first in the […]

  THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN:  Worth A Ticket – The Return of Steven Spielberg   Remember how lousy the last Indiana Jones movie was?  Remember watching it and wondering sadly what had become of Steven Spielberg, the magician who for decades had an irresistible, inexhaustible ability to spin action sequences into sight gags into satisfying […]

  THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER:  Worth A Ticket – The Serious Side of Being a Teen We certainly don’t lack for stories about high school in our popular culture.  The CW and ABCFamily networks are almost entirely devoted to that brief, formative period (as is MTV when it does scripted shows like Awkward.). […]

> See Also: 2011 HONORABLE MENTIONS 2011 WORST 10   As a movie year, 2011 felt, more than anything else, like a reflection of an art and a business in disarray.  Economically, it was a down year and for the major studios, a frightening one:  beyond the special case of the Harry Potter  finale, virtually […]

  HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS:  Not At Any Price – Audiences Won’t Live Happily Ever After HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS is mostly terrible, but say this for it:  it’s not terrible like anything else out there.  If you’ve always wanted to see an R-rated, gore-ridden, smart-alecky anachronistic fantasy in which fairy tale characters […]

> Watch It At Home People complain that Hollywood doesn’t take risks, but Universal went and hired the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks to make a movie about a musical-minded, free-spirit digitally animated character who upturns the life of an ordinary guy… talk about pushing the envelope!  (In fairness, Alvin was a chipmunk singer, […]

> Derick Martini’s HICK is like a Sundance movie that took the wrong indie-film exit and wound up in Toronto.  For whatever reason, Toronto’s film festival tends to find itself with fewer stories of young people from small towns who come of age on the road, so Hick has a little air of distinction here. […]

> The problem with 2011 on screen was more the pervasive mediocrity than an overload of terrible movies, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t some awful films to be found–and, if possible, avoided.  Here are 10 or so: 10.  ONE DAY:  Admittedly, a cheat:  One Day wasn’t a complete disaster–it was far less painful to […]