THE CABIN IN THE WOODS:  Watch it At Home – Clever and Culty   Seeing THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is sort of like being in Fight Club:  the first rule is not to talk about it.  Or, at least, not to reveal any of the wild, ingenious twists put into place by its […]

  THE ZONE OF INTEREST (A24 – TBD):  Jonathan Glazer has only directed 4 feature films in his 23-year career (the most recent was Under the Skin a decade ago).  His latest, The Zone of Interest, is a work of formal brilliance, although unlikely to be to the taste of mainstream audiences.  So rigorous and painstaking in its […]

MEN IN BLACK 3:  Watch It At Home – $250M Worth of “OK”   After years of development, a famously troubled production, untold rewrites and a budget that even Sony admits is around $250M (meaning $400M+ with marketing), MEN IN BLACK 3 is… fine.  Proficient and professional, neither inspired nor demanding, containing a few chuckles, […]

THE AVENGERS:  Worth A Ticket – A Fun Summer Movie, No More Or Less It’s easy to forget that THE AVENGERS is, you know, a movie.  It’s perhaps the ultimate example of corporate intellectual property, bioengineered years in advance of its production by Marvel and that company’s recent owner Disney, like the spawn of particularly […]

  The writer-director Mike Cahill has staked out a unique piece of narrative territory for himself.  In both Another Earth and his new I ORIGINS, which debuted at Sundance last week (and won the festival prize for best science-based work), he explores the point where factual science meets not just science fiction, but something more metaphysical, an area […]

  BOY ERASED (Focus/Universal – November 2):  Joel Edgerton’s film is the second of the year concerning gay conversion therapy, and its tone is far more conventional than The Miseducation of Cameron Post.  Lucas Hedges plays Jared Eamons (this is a fictionalized version of a true story), son of southern pastor Marshall (Russell Crowe) and […]

  THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART I:  Worth A Ticket – Half a Good Movie Is Still Half a Movie As big-screen and small-screen entertainment experiences have begun to merge, there’s been an increase in serialized franchise storytelling–super-expensive mega-movies turned into regularly scheduled series.  Sequels, of course, have always been with us, but through the […]

  THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN:  Worth A Ticket – The Return of Steven Spielberg   Remember how lousy the last Indiana Jones movie was?  Remember watching it and wondering sadly what had become of Steven Spielberg, the magician who for decades had an irresistible, inexhaustible ability to spin action sequences into sight gags into satisfying […]