> 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 […]

> As has been reported, there really was an ambulance outside the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto after the midnight premiere of Alexandre Courtes’ THE INCIDENT, there to rescue at least one person who had fainted during the movie.  Of course, this may just mean that Toronto Film Festival patrons have delicate sensibilities–an idea supported by […]

  Watch it at home.   The deadliest weapon unleashed in BATTLE LOS ANGELES is its barrage of war-movie cliches. Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but there’s this rag-tag group of Marines, led by a hard-bitten veteran, that has to go into enemy territory to rescue some civilians before friendly forces bomb the […]

  30 MINUTES OR LESS – Watch It At Home:  Doesn’t Deliver   The frustration of 30 MINUTES OR LESS is that of all the R-rated comedies this summer, it was the one with the most original premise and promising credentials:  direction by Ruben Fleischer, the man behind the surprisingly smart and funny hit Zombieland, […]

  HAPPY FEET TWO:  Watch It At Home – Not So Happy This Time   Most sequels, by and large, exist only because an earlier movie made lots of money–that’s just a fact.  But sequels often at least try to find some justification beyond that, even if it’s only a commitment to do the same […]

      GONE:  Not Even For Free – Gone?  Not Soon Enough   When was the last time you saw a non-ironic, non-parody movie where someone was sneaking around in a room belonging to a possible villain, searching in almost total silence for evidence in the recesses of a dark closet, when–literally!–a cat came […]

  SAVAGES:  Watch It At Home – Great Book, OK Movie Don Winslow’s novel SAVAGES is one of the extraordinary reads of recent years.  The plot may sound unremarkable–a mini-war is waged between a couple of Orange County drug dealers and a Mexican cartel–but the words “gripping” and “page-turning” don’t do justice to Winslow’s prose, […]

  With The Silver-Linings Playbook and now Wayne Blair’s THE SAPPHIRES, Harvey Weinstein may have the feel-good part of the coming awards season locked down.  This slight but charming true story (or at least “inspired by” one) about an Australian singing group is like the happytime version of Dreamgirls. The story is set in 1968 Australia, a time when, […]