As an actor, James Franco often delivers performances that are packed in quotation marks, as though he’s an actor playing the role of an actor playing his role.  In I AM MICHAEL, however, he does serious, substantive work as Michael Glatze, a real-life one-time gay activist who became not just a fundamentalist Christian pastor, but a […]

  The writer Peter Morgan is a whiz at boring into little-remembered (and in the US, sometimes little-known) crannies of recent history and scooping out the rich drama inside, with scripts like The Deal, Frost/Nixon and The Damned United to his credit, along with the more celebrated The Queen.  (His occasional forays into pure fiction […]

  THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU (Warners) – Opens September 19 – Worth A Ticket Jonathan Tropper’s very successful day job is writing seriocomic novels about families and romance that are distinguished by their male protagonists–the ground he trods is similar to Nick Hornby’s, but without quite matching Hornby’s freshness of approach or wit.  […]

  BERGMAN ISLAND (IFC – Oct. 15):  Mia Hansen-Love’s Bergman Island asks to be poked and scrutinized in several ways.  It takes place on the island of Faro, where Ingmar Bergman filmed some of his most celebrated masterpieces and lived the last decades of his life, and which now hosts a thriving business of tours […]

> Watch it At Home;  Something Acceptable. As romantic comedies with Kate Hudson go, SOMETHING BORROWED isn’t so bad.  After her spectacular debut in Almost Famous, Hudson’s become something of a brand name for dreadful rom-coms that nevertheless make money (How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, You, Me & Dupree, Fool’s Gold, My […]

  QUARTET:  Watch It At Home – AARP’s Version of a Rock Concert Reunion Movie It may come as a surprise to some of the directors who’ve tangled with Dustin Hoffman to hear that QUARTET is supposed to mark his first time in charge, but officially, at least, Hoffman has never taken the reins on […]

  SNOWDEN (Open Road – Sept 16):  Oliver Stone’s return to politically-charged biography is subdued by the standards of his Nixon or W.  It’s a hagiography that follows the character arc of his Born of the Fourth of July (true believer finds his ideals crushed by political reality and transforms into a revolutionary agent against […]

  PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9):  Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation.  Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, which came to be known as “Peterloo” because the bloodshed was likened to the then-recent […]