> Whit Stillman has one of the most distinctive voices in American film, and his 13-year absence from the screen barely shows in his new comedy DAMSELS IN DISTRESS; it feels as though, had it been made immediately after The Last Days of Disco in 1998, nothing about it would be the slightest bit different. […]

  ANNA KARENINA – Watch It At Home – Beautiful But Overconceptualized Version of the Tolstoy Classic Joe Wright was introduced to the world with his film of Pride and Prejudice, and it seems like he’s been trying to escape the pigeonhole of staid Literary Classics director ever since. His Atonement, while based on another celebrated novel, […]

  THE HATE U GIVE (20th – October 19):  YA radicalization.  George Tillman Jr’s film, from a sprawling script by Audrey Wells (based on the novel by Angie Thomas) centers on Starr (Amandla Stenberg), an African-American teen who witnesses her friend shot to death by a white cop.  But the story also wants to encompass […]

  The “spoiler” situation with respect to Richard Linklater’s BEFORE MIDNIGHT is a particularly tricky one, because for those passionately invested in the saga that began with 1995’s Before Sunrise and continued in 2004 with Before Sunset, even the most bare-bones description of what the new film is about, which must disclose, by necessity, what’s become of Celine (Julie Delpy) and […]

> Sundance changed the way it kicks things off this year. Instead of a single high-profile Opening Night Film (which has almost always turned out to be a disappointment), the festival screened several smaller films. For those of us who arrived before the madness begins in earnest tomorrow, there was the chance to get Wait […]

    ANOTHER EARTH – Worth A Ticket:  Tiny Story With Big Ambitions   For ANOTHER EARTH, the Sundance Film Festival went exactly the way it’s supposed to.  The low-key picture was made on a miniscule budget (a few hundred thousand dollars) by complete unknowns, director/cinematographer/editor/co-writer/co-producer Mike Cahill and star/co-writer/co-producer Brit Marling, with far less […]

  THE BURIAL (MGM/Amazon – Oct. 13):  A yarn that’s also a true story.  Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) was the owner of a family-run, regional Mississippi business that for decades had offered funeral services and burial insurance to its customers.  When Jeremiah’s finances took a turn, he made a deal with a conglomerate headed […]

As an actor, James Franco often delivers performances that are packed in quotation marks, as though he’s an actor playing the role of an actor playing his role.  In I AM MICHAEL, however, he does serious, substantive work as Michael Glatze, a real-life one-time gay activist who became not just a fundamentalist Christian pastor, but a […]