DIVERGENT:  Watch It At Home – Not Hungry Enough The film of DIVERGENT, even more than Veronica Roth’s YA-franchise source novel, is determined to resemble The Hunger Games as much as any movie can that’s telling a different story with a different set of characters.  (Not an illogical thing to do, considering that the […]

As an actor, James Franco often delivers performances that are packed in quotation marks, as though he’s an actor playing the role of an actor playing his role.  In I AM MICHAEL, however, he does serious, substantive work as Michael Glatze, a real-life one-time gay activist who became not just a fundamentalist Christian pastor, but a […]

  THE DISCOVERY (Netflix):  Charlie McDowell’s first film was the ingenious metaphysical farce The One I Love, so there was plenty of reason to eagerly anticipate his follow-up.  He (and, once again, co-writer Justin Lader) return to some of the same philosophical territory again with The Discovery, but with less pleasing results.  The main action […]

  22 JULY (Netflix – October 10):  So many terrible things have happened in the world since July 22, 2011 that at least in the US, few even remember the horrific events that occurred in Oslo, Norway that day, when a single right-wing fanatic named Andres Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people, most of them […]

  HORSE GIRL (Netflix – February 7):  Every one of the four films Jeff Baena has directed had its premiere at Sundance, with Horse Girl following Life After Beth, Joshy and The Little Hours.  It’s an impressive accomplishment for a filmmaker who hasn’t made a particular commercial or critical breakout hit.  Horse Girl may have […]

  HONK FOR JESUS.  SAVE YOUR SOUL (no distrib):  Scandal-ridden mega-churches aren’t exactly fresh territory for screens big (The Tears of Tammy Faye) or small (The Righteous Gemstones), with tones that range from wildly comic to solemn.  Adamma Edo’s feature debut doesn’t have much to add to the subject, but it does have Sterling K. […]

  WICKED LITTLE LETTERS (no distrib):  In The Lost Daughter, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley played the same character at different ages, which prevented them from sharing the screen.  That’s remedied in the fairly irresistible Wicked Little Letters, an English small-town comedy in the classic (if exceptionally foul-mouthed) mode.  Inspired by a true incident, it tells the […]

  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 […]