OFFICIAL SECRETS (IFC):  Film festivals have a way of creating unintended double features when thematically similar films are seen in close proximity, and it’s hard to watch Gavin Hood’s Official Secrets without thinking about Scott Z Burns’s The Report.  Both are stories of whistleblowers and cover-ups involving the lead-up to the war in Iraq, […]

MADAGASCAR 3:  EUROPE’S MOST WANTED – Worth A Ticket – A Circus Indeed   There’s a certain luxury in being DreamWorks Animation.   Pixar gets the awards and the acclaim, but it’s also held to an impossibly high standard:  if Cars 2 had been a DreamWorks movie, it would have been considered a perfectly reasonable entertainment, […]

    Everything is a little smoother in 2002’s HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS.  The young actors give more assured performances; Steve Kloves’ script, having gotten so much exposition out of its way in Sorcerer’s Stone, is faster and more character-based; the camerawork (by Roger Pratt instead of John Seale) is more fluid; […]

  SOMETIMES I THINK ABOUT DYING:  The Office, for depressives.  Fran (Daisy Ridley) is the most anonymous member of a nondescript shipping department in a small Oregon town, wrapped in so many layers of emotional insulation that she can’t make the smallest of small talk and flees from any interaction with her officemates.  When Robert […]

  PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN (Annapurna – Oct. 13):  In the hothouse of a film festival, movies that are unrelated inevitably begin to collide with each other in the viewer’s mind.  So it’s difficult, in a festival that’s given us the extraordinary Disobedience, to give similar weight to Angela Robinson’s much frothier and thinner […]

> JOHN CARTER:  Watch It At Home – Never Goes Into Orbit All signs suggest that JOHN CARTER will be a financial failure of historic proportions, mostly because of its colossal cost (Disney admits to $250M, which almost certainly means close to $300M when reshoots and last-minute CG are included–and that doesn’t count the $100-150M […]

  GLASS ONION (Netflix – November 4 in theaters, December 23 online):  After Rian Johnson’s Knives Out broke through to become one of the increasingly few non-IP-based mainstream hits in the market ($311.6M worldwide), Netflix moved aggressively to buy out the franchise, reportedly paying $450M for the next 2 crime-solving adventures of detective Benoit Blanc […]

  BLINDED BY THE LIGHT (New Line/Warners):  Sundance was somewhat awash in feel-good movies this year, which is unusual but not unprecedented.  One of the most successful in previous years was 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, directed by Gurinder Chadha.  Chadha returned to the festival this year after some time in the movie wilderness (Bride […]