Earnest and low-key to a fault, Liza Johnson’s HATESHIP LOVESHIP might have felt more at home in the Narrative Competition at Sundance than in Toronto.  It has a dramatic recessiveness, almost a passivity, for much of its length, that makes it hard to see just what kind of story it thinks it’s telling.  Ultimately, though, it […]

  AMERICAN HUSTLE:  Buy A Ticket – David O. Russell’s Epic Romp Is a Party That Goes On Till Dawn Even though it’s concerned with con men, low-lifes and deluded losers, AMERICAN HUSTLE is the happiest movie in town.  The co-writer/director David O. Russell seems intoxicated with life’s utter craziness and the joy of moviemaking; […]

  SABOTAGE:  Not Even For Free – A Bloody Waste SABOTAGE is a lot bloodier than you’re expecting.  A lot bloodier.  I mention this upfront because although an R-rated Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle carries with it a certain likelihood of violence, the level of gore in Sabotage is more like what you’d see in a horror […]

  Every year when I arrive at Sundance, I swear to myself that I’ll review each film there as soon as I’ve seen it, but after making the effort to keep up for the first day or two, a daily screening schedule that starts at 8:30AM each morning (earlier if you need to be on a Wait List line, and that […]

  CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (Sony Classics):  Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous gay romance has been anointed as the Sundance entry most likely to figure into next year’s Oscar race, and it’s easy to see why.  It combines the appeal of traditional prestige drama (James Ivory, who practically invented the modern version of that genre, is […]

  DESTROYER (Annapurna – Dec. 25):  Another fractured-time thriller, this one trickier than most, because the script by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi features a sort of time-loop within a loop.  All that structural fanciness aside, Destroyer is mostly a vehicle for Nicole Kidman’s aggressively deglamorized performance as an end-of-the-line LAPD detective named Erin Bell.  […]

  SERGIO (Netflix – April 17):  Greg Barker’s film has an unusual pedigree.  Barker, up to this point a documentarian, directed a nonfiction version of the same story (and with the same title) in 2009, but decided that he wanted to explore the life of UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello further in a way […]

  892 (no distrib):  John Boyega’s turbo-charged performance fuels this true story.  In 2017, when Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) entered a Wells Fargo branch in a suburb of Atlanta and informed the teller that his backpack contained a bomb, he wasn’t trying to hold up the bank.  Rather, it was his desperate attempt to get enough […]