The screenwriter James Vanderbilt has made his directing debut with TRUTH, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, and at times it’s clear that this is a writer’s movie:  Vanderbilt gives no fewer than three of his characters the opportunity for a Rousing Final Speech, something another director might well have toned down.  […]

  SATURDAY NIGHT (Columbia/Sony – Sept 27):  It’s easy to imagine a film about Saturday Night Live making a statement about the cultural, political and financial impact of the show, or recounting its long journey from being a shout of youthful abandon to one of the last remaining pillars of traditional broadcast television.  That isn’t the […]

  EMILY THE CRIMINAL (no distrib):  John Patton Ford’s feature debut is a lean, gritty, accomplished thriller with a smashing star performance from Aubrey Plaza.  Plaza (who also produced) plays the titular Emily, an aspiring artist whose career got derailed due to a violent incident in college, giving her a record that’s preventing her from […]

> 21 JUMP STREET:  Watch It At Home – High School Meta-Bromance The meta-ization of contemporary comedy marches on:  Community, of course, is a virtual meta-kingdom, but Happy Endings makes Friends jokes, this week’s 30 Rock undercut what appeared to be its own sentimental ending with jokes poking at viewers who might like sentimental endings, […]

  THE INSPECTION (A24 – November 14):  Back in 1983, Robert Altman directed the film version of David Rabe’s play Streamers, about a Vietnam-era boot camp that turned even more violent and vicious with the catalyst of one recruit’s closeted homosexuality.  Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection tells a similar story for the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” […]

  CAPTAIN PHILLIPS:  Order Tickets Now – Exceptionally Taut, Intelligent Real-Life Thriller Paul Greenglass is a master of capturing pulse-pounding immediacy on film, and for most directors that would be enough.  Hollywood would be more than happy to back a money truck up to his door and have him churn out nothing but additional Bourne […]

  Back when Stanley Kubrick still planned to direct the film that became AI: Artificial Intelligence, he famously toyed with the idea of shooting it bit by bit over a period of years, so that the young protagonist would literally age on screen.  Now Richard Linklater, the most unKubrickian of filmmakers, has done exactly that with BOYHOOD, […]

> Tonight’s Grammy Awards were inevitably somewhat haunted by the awful loss of Whitney Houston barely 24 hours earlier, a tragedy that seemed to have been going on for a decade yet was still shocking when it came to its fruition.  Nevertheless, the show found time to include innumerable music numbers, some of them saluting […]