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 HOBBIT:  THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES – Watch It At Home – The Best of the Hobbit Trilogy Is Still Just Its Tallest Dwarf It’s hard to get around the sad fact that Peter Jackson’s THE HOBBIT trilogy has diminished the stature of his great Lord of the Rings series.  It’s all […]

  AMERICAN HUSTLE:  Buy A Ticket – David O. Russell’s Epic Romp Is a Party That Goes On Till Dawn Even though it’s concerned with con men, low-lifes and deluded losers, AMERICAN HUSTLE is the happiest movie in town.  The co-writer/director David O. Russell seems intoxicated with life’s utter craziness and the joy of moviemaking; […]

> Although the word “International” is part of the name of the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s still Canada’s premier festival, and naturally features quite a few homegrown films.  Some of the most notable of these have already been announced (like David Cronenberg’s A DANGEROUS METHOD), and today TIFF announced the bulk of the rest.  […]

    Worth a ticket.   In movies, as in life, when someone is offered an illicit miracle drug that seems too good to be true, it usually is. So the general narrative arc of LIMITLESS doesn’t come as a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Neil Burger’s film, predicted to be the highest […]

> WANDERLUST:  Watch It At Home – Hippy Jokes Thawed Out From 1966 The new WANDERLUST demonstrates the strengths and limitations of amiability in movies.  Its stars, Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, have made very profitable careers out of being professionally likable.  Unlike, say, Tom Hanks, who also began his career in light comedy but […]

  DALLAS BUYERS CLUB is more Erin Brockovich than Brian’s Song, and that’s why it works so well.  Jean-Marc Vallee’s film, written by Craig Borten and Melisa Walack, is too angry to be sentimental.  Set during the 1980s, it tells the story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey, in a career-highlight performance), a hard-living, homophobic Texas electrician and rodeo rider […]