THIS IS 40 – Watch It At Home – Judd Apatow’s Midlife Crisis Comedy-Drama is Both Ambitious and Bland As Judd Apatow has matured as a filmmaker, he’s staked out a piece of territory that’s original but not necessarily workable:  he wants to be both the Paul Mazursky and the John Cassavetes of sitcom showrunners. Although […]

    MARGIN CALL:  Worth A Ticket – The Real Sequel to”Wall Street”   MARGIN CALL is smarter and more gripping than Moneyball and The Ides of March combined–and those are two smart, gripping movies.  However, the superb ensemble cast of Margin Call doesn’t boast a name as instantly bankable as Brad Pitt’s or George […]

  ONE SECOND (Neon – TBD):  Zhang Yimou’s film was notoriously the subject of controversy with the Chinese government, which held it back from its originally scheduled film festival debut in 2019, and forced some reediting and even reshooting, so one assumes that in its initial version, the story, set during the Cultural Revolution, was […]

> EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE:  Worth A Ticket –  Earns Its Tears If EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE accomplishes nothing else–and it actually accomplishes quite a bit–it’s served to let us know exactly where the third rail of current American popular culture is located.  It’s not every day that the august NY Times informs […]

  THE SITTER:  Not At Any Price – Adventures In Bad Moviemaking   Jonah Hill is awfully lucky to have made Moneyball this year.  In that film, fueled by a brilliant Aaron Sorkin/Steven Zaillain script, he gave a marvelous performance as half of the year’s most unlikely comedy team with Brad Pitt, but since then […]

KILLER ELITE:  Watch It At Home – Neither Killer Nor Elite   The new KILLER ELITE takes little from Sam Peckinpah’s 1975 action movie apart from its title (Peckinpah used “The” in his) and the general notion of mercenaries and ex-spies double-crossing each other.  This isn’t a huge loss, as the 1975 version was part […]

> The Sundance Film Festival, like Toronto, issues its announcements about the films that will be screening in several stages.  (Sundance’s sadism about actually obtaining tickets, however, is all its own.)  Today came the first release for the January 2012 Festival, covering the US and international competition slates in Dramatic and Documentary films.  These are […]

> DRIVE is a self-conscious genre movie, and those are tricky propositions.  On the one hand, you need to make your existential or other textual statement with all the artistry at your command; on the other, you still have to fulfill the demands of the genre you’ve chosen.  If you do it right, you have […]