OBLIVION:  Worth A Ticket – Dramatically Uneven, But Visually Spectacular OBLIVION is amazing to look at.  Even though it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic landscape where movie and TV audiences seem to spend most of their time these days, the director Joseph Kosinski and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda (he just won the Oscar […]

  UPSTREAM COLOR:  Worth A Ticket – But Not If You Require Coherent Plotting I’d be lying if I said I really knew what the hell was going on in UPSTREAM COLOR, and yet the experience of watching it was surprisingly enjoyable, even gripping in an odd way.  Watching Shane Carruth’s film (he serves as […]

  42:  Watch It At Home – The Hallmark Baseball Hall of Fame It may well be that 42 is the Jackie Robinson movie audiences want.  It’s a straightforward, handsomely-produced, inspirational telling of a genuinely uplifting story, the 1946-47 baseball seasons when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) broke the color line in American baseball, first in the […]

  EVIL DEAD:  Watch It At Home – Plenty of Icky, Not So Much Scary A slick, Hollywood-budgeted remake of Sam Raimi’s 1981 EVIL DEAD (actually there was a ‘the” in front of that one, the definite article having been misplaced over the decades) is sort of a contradiction in terms.  The whole appeal of […]

  TRANCE:  Watch It At Home – Tricky But Unsatisfying Thriller From Danny Boyle TRANCE is both extremely clever and remarkably stupid.  I wish I could explain exactly how, but Danny Boyle’s thriller, written by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, has the kind of story that piles reversals on twists on reveals, so there’s not […]

  G.I. JOE: RETALIATION:  Not Even For Free – Endlessly Dumb Exercise In Boom-Boom Action There’s a difference between making a movie for 11-year old boys and having a script that seems to have been written by one.  (Or in this case by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, doing a faithful imitation of one.)  Idiocy […]

  THE CROODS:  Watch It At Home – Prehistoric Sitcom’s Bland Storyline Doesn’t Evolve Hollywood already has a thriving CG-animated prehistoric franchise in the Ice Age series, but DreamWorks Animation is in serious need of a hit, so now there’s the new THE CROODS.  It’s far too familiar, not just in the setting and plot territory it explores […]

  OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN:  Watch It At Home – Better Luck in June In Hollywood’s grand tradition of 2 movies about volcanoes, 2 about Snow White, 2 about Christopher Columbus and 2 about Truman Capote, this year we’re getting a pair of terrorist attacks on the White House, each foiled by a heroic Secret Service […]