THE GOOD NURSE (Netflix – Oct. 26):  An unusually serious thriller about a serial killer.  Tobias Lindholm’s film, from a script by Krysty Wilson-Cairns (who wrote 1917 and  Last Night In Soho) and based on a book by Charles Graeber that recounted a true story, has a deliberately ambiguous title.  It seems at first […]

  COLOMBIANA – Not Even For Free:  Even the Body Count Is Dull   For a movie from the Luc Besson House of Action, COLOMBIANA is surprisingly listless and dispirited.  Besson first came to prominence as a director, with pictures like Subway and The Big Blue to his credit; then in 1990, he hit the […]

  LATE NIGHT (Amazon):  It’s legitimate to note that the thoroughly mainstream and commercial Late Night belonged at Sundance just about as much as The Devil Wears Prada would have, since to a large extent it transposes Prada from fashion to the world of late-night talk shows.  The festival’s decision to host Late Night (which paid […]

  TAKEN 2:  Watch It At Home – “Particular Set of Skills” Indeed   As silly sequels to mindless hits go, TAKEN 2 is fairly entertaining, at least for a while.  The first movie, of course, was a surprise smash in 2009, at $145M (in the US alone) Liam Neeson’s biggest success as a solo […]

  There’s a tendency to compare any slow-moving, beautifully-photographed drama with an abundance of natural imagery to the films of Terence Malick, but that’s unfair to the very particular surreal spirituality Malick brings even to his more insufferable projects.  In the case of AIN’T THEM BODIES SAINTS, the more apt comparison is probably to Robert […]

  THE COUNSELOR:  Not Even For Free – A Deluxe Pedigree, But Only Cut-Rate Nihilism The first “uh-oh” moment in THE COUNSELOR comes early, perhaps 10 minutes in.  We’ve barely been introduced to Reiner (Javier Bardem, genially dissolute, his hair spiky this time) and his lover Malkina (Cameron Diaz, speaking with an on-again, off-again sultry […]

  INHUMANS:  Friday 9PM on ABC (starting Sept 29) – Change the Channel In this world of Peak TV, it’s harder for a new series to break through the clutter than it’s ever been, and that thicket will be a veritable forest during the fourth week of September, when the major broadcast networks will follow […]

ROCK OF AGES:  Watch It At Home – Stop Believin’   No one expects finesse from a movie musical constructed out of songs by Journey, Twisted Sister and Def Leppard.  And, to be certain, the hair-band era of the 80s wasn’t known for its “less is more” aesthetic.  But Adam Shankman’s jukebox musical Glee-ish movie […]