PLAYING FOR KEEPS:  Not At Any Price – All Penalty, No Kick Has any actor more thoroughly wasted his 15 minutes in the Hollywood spotlight than Gerard Butler?  Since he hit with 300 half a dozen years ago, he’s churned out PS I Love You, Nim’s Island, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth, Gamer, Law Abiding […]

  THE BUTLER:  Worth A Ticket – Superb Acting Elevates A History Lesson THE BUTLER, in its form and earnestness, recalls the days of prestige TV movies and miniseries that used to be associated with the Hallmark Hall of Fame and network sweeps periods (and which now exist only as a vestige on pay-cable, mostly […]

> Not Even For Free; No Pig’s Blood At This Shindig. The relationships we have with the stars we watch are no less real for being imaginary, and that’s particularly true for television stars, whom we often watch inhabit and grow within the same character over a period of years.  So fans of the great […]

> Watch It At Home;  The thrills are so postmodern, they don’t seem to be happening in the theater. When the original Scream arrived in 1996, the slaughtering-the-teenagers genre was already old enough to drive; the first Friday the 13th had opened more than 16 years before.  The conventions of the form were as well-worn […]

  THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO:  Worth A Ticket – David Fincher Meets Lisbeth Salander   The most remarkable thing about David Fincher’s version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (written for the English-language screen by Steven Zaillian) is that while remaining, for the most part, scrupulously faithful to the best-selling novel by […]

> Sundance has a thriving Park City At Midnight program that features plenty of high-octane horror movies, but the most unnerving and disturbing film of this year’s festival may have been Craig Zobel’s COMPLIANCE, a low-key drama based (apparently rather closely) on a true story without any hacked-off limbs or hint of the supernatural. In […]

  PEOPLE LIKE US:  Watch It At Home – Not The First Movie Like This   Sam Harper (Chris Pine) is a guy we’ve met before.  He’s the fast-talking, self-absorbed hustler who gets along in life by sheer nerve, and doesn’t really care about anyone else.  He needs to open himself up to the problems […]

> THE LORAX:  Not Even For Free – A Seussian Mess It may not be pretty, but surely it’s true–Credit must go where credit is due.  In this case, that means the Universal Pictures Marketing Department, which as it turns out has done a splendid job these last few weeks of hiding just how thoroughly […]