> Chris Columbus’ Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets were well-crafted, entertaining movies, but Alfonso Cuaron’s 2004 HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN was the first real Potter film. It’s also the least successful financially (if you think $795M worldwide is something to complain about). This may be because it’s burdened by the most […]
MELANCHOLIA – Watch It At Home – The Title Tells the Tale Here’s a quick primer in Oscar rules and how studios can get around them. In order for a film to be Oscar-eligible (other than in a few special categories like Documentary and Foreign Film), it needs a theatrical release in […]
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release): The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage. A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened. That makes The Eyes of […]
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 […]
Kate Barker-Froyland’s directing debut SONG ONE is so wispy and insubstantial that the bytes making up its digital images seem barely capable of adhering to a screen. Clearly influenced by John Carney’s mini-musical Once, it makes Carney’s film look like an Andrew Lloyd-Webber spectacle by comparison. Barker-Froyland also wrote the minimal script, which almost exhausts its resources […]
THE MONUMENTS MEN: Watch It At Home – George Clooney’s Film Is No Classic Work of Art George Clooney’s THE MONUMENTS MEN is a startlingly complete failure. It’s Clooney’s fifth film behind the camera (after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads, and The Ides of March), but it’s the […]
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO: Worth A Ticket – David Fincher Meets Lisbeth Salander The most remarkable thing about David Fincher’s version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (written for the English-language screen by Steven Zaillian) is that while remaining, for the most part, scrupulously faithful to the best-selling novel by […]
MACHINE GUN PREACHER: Watch It At Home – A True Story Rings False MACHINE GUN PREACHER simply isn’t good enough for the story it wants to tell. And the story, a true one, is remarkable: Sam Childers (played by Gerard Butler in the film) was a drug addict and violent criminal who found […]