The writer-director Mike Cahill has staked out a unique piece of narrative territory for himself.  In both Another Earth and his new I ORIGINS, which debuted at Sundance last week (and won the festival prize for best science-based work), he explores the point where factual science meets not just science fiction, but something more metaphysical, an area […]

  TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Not Even For Free – Hollywood’s Blockbuster Mentality To the Max Here are just a few of the epic movies with running times shorter than the 165 minutes of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Apocalypse Now, Avatar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Bridge On the River Kwai, Boogie Nights and Empire […]

  Events on the same-sex rights front have moved so quickly that FREEHELD, which is based on a true story from 2007, and has been in development almost since it occurred, now feels like something of a history story.  Not completely, of course–as the current situation of the Kentucky clerk who won’t issue marriage licenses […]

  PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Annapurna – Oct. 13):  In the hothouse of a film festival, movies that are unrelated inevitably begin to collide with each other in the viewer’s mind.  So it’s difficult, in a festival that’s given us the extraordinary Disobedience, to give similar weight to Angela Robinson’s much frothier and thinner […]

  STATE OF THE UNION (Sundance Channel):  The lines between narrative visual media continue to blur, and State Of the Union is an A-list talent contribution to a genre that doesn’t exactly exist yet.  It’s a story told in ten 10-minute episodes, all of them written by the novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby and directed […]

  JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (Warners/HBO Max – February 12):  The title refers to the FBI informant Bill O’Neal (played here by LaKeith Stanfield) and the Illinois Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).  Although Hampton was only 21 years old, he was so charismatic and successful–he had put together a local coalition that […]

  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 […]

  THE OUTRUN (no distrib):  Films about alcoholics and addicts in recovery are too numerous to count, and it’s easy to understand why.  The stories offer a clear narrative path, usually with an inspirational destination (occasionally with a tragic end, which can be just as cathartic), as well as a ready-made showcase for the star, […]