VERONICA MARS:  Watch It At Home – Still a TV Show, For Better and Worse It was probably impossible for the movie of VERONICA MARS to live up to the story of how it came to be made.  That’s an epic, decade-long saga, which began when the TV series, critically praised but never a […]

  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 […]

  NEED FOR SPEED:  Watch It At Home – Not Enough Fuel If there was ever a movie that didn’t need to be over 2 hours long, the relatively unpretentious NEED FOR SPEED was it.  Action movies these days too often feel like they have to be epics, loaded with backstory and climactic showdowns that […]

  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – Wes Anderson’s Latest Fancy Box Has Something Inside Where has the “Academy” 1.37:1 screen aspect ratio been all of Wes Anderson’s life?  One of Anderson’s visual motifs (some would say “fetishes”) is to photograph his actors enclosed in windows, doorways, or other pieces of production design, […]

  ENDLESS LOVE:  Not Even For Free – Hopeless Wreck Truly:  why does this new ENDLESS LOVE exist?  Even on the crassest commercial level, it makes very little sense.  The 1981 Franco Zeffirelli/Brooke Shields/Martin Hewitt version is remembered as neither good nor particularly successful (it made only half as much as Shields’ Blue Lagoon had […]

  WINTER’S TALE:  Not Even For Free – 2 Hours of Thin Tinsel The new movie WINTER’S TALE makes one ponder the phrase “labor of love.”  It marks the feature directing debut of the enormously successful writer/producer Akiva Goldsman, whose films include A Time To Kill, A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man, Hancock, The Da Vinci […]

  ROBOCOP:  Watch It At Home – A Tinny Remake This weekend’s movie openings feature no less than 3 remakes of 1980s hits, with new versions of ROBOCOP, About Last Night and Endless Love arriving at once, but it’s just as notable that all three were R-rated in their original forms, and two have now […]

  THE LEGO MOVIE:  Buy A Ticket – The Pieces All Fit Together Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s THE LEGO MOVIE wants to have its family movie cake and eat it too, and it’s a remarkably tasty dish.  Lego takes the kind of endlessly clever, fully-realized fantasy universe we associate with the best of Pixar […]