The screenplay for THE SPECTACULAR NOW, a Dramatic Competition entry at Sundance, was written by the team of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who also wrote (500) Days of Summer, but the new film has none of the breezy and somewhat gimmicky visual style of that hit.  Director James Ponsoldt, instead, goes to the […]

  A couple of Sundances ago, the actress/writer/producer Brit Marling was a festival darling, with two acclaimed pictures unveiled the same week.  In the end, while both Another Earth and Sound of My Voice received distribution, neither found much of a mainstream audience.  (Marling’s also established an acting career that included a very good turn in last year’s Arbitrage.) […]

  STOKER is the kind of swank, elegant horror movie we don’t see very often in these days of unkillable chainsaw-wielding serial killers who make awful use of human remains.  It’s chilling, more than a little crazy, and also borderline silly, all of which are part of the fun. The film is the first English-language project […]

  BROKEN CITY:  Watch It At Home – Wahlberg and Crowe In An Intriguing But Too Simplistic Thriller Studios love nothing better than predictability, so since Mark Wahlberg had a tidy January hit last year with Contraband, it was no surprise when Fox slotted his new thriller BROKEN CITY for the same weekend in 2013.  […]

  GANGSTER SQUAD – Watch It At Home – Snappy, Violent and Completely Vacuous Watching the new GANGSTER SQUAD is a bit like checking into one of those giant Vegas theme park hotels and expecting to find yourself in the real Rome, Venice or Paris:  the place is luxurious, but utterly fake.  The director Ruben […]

  The year’s Top 10 movies are here, and a variety of honorable mentions are here.  But now for something completely different… Along with the egg nog and tinsel, there’s a certain undeniable seasonal pleasure to be had in singling out the truly spectacular misses of the movie year for some shame and ridicule.  We […]

  2012 was, in the end, a very good year for movies–or a a good half-year, more accurately.  With the studios continuing to load their best efforts into the festival- and awards-heavy fall and winter part of the calendar, not a single one of the Top 10 below opened before July, and only 3 before […]

  Showbuzzdaily’s Top 10 Films of 2012 can be found here, and the Worst 10 are here.  But there were other movies this year worth remembering: HONORABLE MENTIONS CLOUD ATLAS (Warners – October – written and directed by Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer): An impossibly ambitious epic that was thrilling when it worked. […]