THE INTERNSHIP:  Watch It At Home – No Search Engine Necessary To Predict the Plot Vince Vaughn has been playing his motormouth-with-a-heart-of-gold character pretty much non-stop since Swingers in 1996.  That’s 17 years of minimal variations on the same basic schtick.  It’s not that he can’t do anything else–he was quite good in a […]

  MEGALOPOLIS (American Zoetrope/Lionsgate – Sept. 27):  Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited, much-discussed return to epic filmmaking, self-financed to the tune of $125M+ (he’s paying for the marketing as well as the production) is, alas, a hapless failure in every way.  Its fatuous pretentiousness might be excusable if it were a dazzling piece of cinema, but it […]

  LAWLESS:  Watch It At Home – A Moonshine War To Make You Long for “Boardwalk Empire” Director John Hillcoat specializes in stark, emotionally distanced pulp, and if that sounds like a contradiction in terms, often it is.  His Australian western The Proposition, about a man murderously stalking his own brother, had a gnarled power, […]

  FLORA AND SON (Apple):  John Carney’s Irish dramedy was (with Fair Play) the commercial bonanza of Sundance, reportedly with a $20M pricetag.  It isn’t hard to see why the studio and streamer checkbooks came out, since Flora and Son was one of the festival’s unabashed crowd pleasers.  Like most of Carney’s work (Once, Sing […]

  Virtually every screening at Sundance is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, and while these sessions can be informative and charming (although 3 questions that need never be asked again are How long did you shoot?  What was the budget? and How much was improvised?), they can also be quite sad.  Watching them, […]

> Watch It At Home:  For Fans of Florescent Green Another summer weekend; another superhero epic.  What used to be an extravagant event genre is now hard-pressed to muster more than a yawn.  What is there to say about GREEN LANTERN?  Well, it’s better than January’s sophomoric Green Hornet, so at least it’s got color […]

  THE BOURNE LEGACY:  Watch It At Home – Not Up To the Real Bournes THE BOURNE LEGACY has been concocted with a combination of ingenuity and desperation.  It exists because Universal–a studio dangerously light on action and fantasy movie franchises in an era where those are at the dead center of the business–couldn’t afford […]

  ANCHORMAN 2: THE LEGEND CONTINUES:  Watch It At Home – Fun But Overextended Silliness ANCHORMAN 2:  THE LEGEND CONTINUES runs 119 minutes, which is rather too much of a not-bad thing (the original Anchorman, in 2004, was a brisk 94 minutes), but it pales in comparison to the accumulated length of the marketing campaign […]