TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

  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 […]

  BLENDED:  Not Even For Free – A Bad Sitcom Episode, 4 Times As Long On the Adam Sandler Movie Pain-o-Meter (patent pending), the new BLENDED ranks about midway between the not-so-bad Just Go With It and the soul-crushing horror of That’s My Dad and Jack & Jill.  It’s Sandler wearing his sentimental, romantic hat, […]

  LIFE OF PI:  Worth A Ticket – A Floating Display of Visual Marvels A boy and a Bengal tiger get into a lifeboat… The digital paintbox now available to filmmakers provides an almost limitless variety of visual possibilities, and also a certain amount of temptation, because like any resource, it can be overused.  Ang […]

In recent years, the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film has come to stand for not much more than a fair level of craftsmanship and a comfortable pitch of moral predicament (The Secret In Their Eyes, Departures, and The Counterfeiters are the most recent undistinguished winners).  This year’s winner, Susanne Bier’s IN A BETTER WORLD, […]

  VERY GOOD GIRLS is set in contemporary Brooklyn, but it’s shot (by Bobby Bukowski) with the kind of gauzy glow that suggests a European perfume commercial.  It’s lovely to look at, but also mystifying and ultimately annoying, and that describes the movie too. Naomi Foner, who wrote and directed the film, makes her directing debut […]

  THAT AWKWARD MOMENT:  Watch It At Home – Low-Impact Rom-Com If you heard that a new indie movie featured the stars of the past 2 years’ back-to-back Sundance sensations, Michael B. Jordan from 2013’s Fruitvale Station and Miles Teller from this year’s Whiplash, would you be intrigued? What if Zac Efron was the other […]

  OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL:  Watch It At Home – Not All Yellow Brick Roads Are Golden The digital landscapes in Sam Raimi’s prequel OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL are gorgeous:  eye-poppingly colorful, and crammed with beautiful, intricate detail.  There’s also a flying, talking monkey and a living china doll, both generated in the […]