BATTLESHIP:  Not Even For Free – Watch a Transformers DVD Instead   For about half an hour, BATTLESHIP could fool you into thinking it’s not the movie you were expecting it to be.  It begins as the story of Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), a good-looking, unmotivated screw-up who lives with his straight-arrow […]

  THE DICTATOR:  Watch It At Home – Little Shock, No Awe   With Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen made one of the noisiest splashes into movie stardom of the past decade, daring and distinctive.  The question was whether he could follow it up.  And the answer, based on Bruno and the new THE DICTATOR, is […]

  DARK SHADOWS:  Watch it At Home – Loving Detail Isn’t Enough   DARK SHADOWS is one of the most confounding big-budget movies of recent years.  When Tim Burton (and his muse, Johnny Depp, one of the film’s producers as well as its star) announced that their next project would be a revisit to the […]

> One of the good things about going to midnight premieres of blockbusters (there aren’t all that many) is that the audience is exactly the group (young, first adopters, eagerly moviegoing) Hollywood is targeting.  A theatre almost entirely composed of that crowd provides a ready-made focus group to gauge how upcoming releases are faring with […]

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 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 […]

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – A Different Kind of Dream Team Bear with me here. On Friday, Fox Searchlight will throw THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL directly into the path of the mega-buster that is The Avengers.  (Well, in 27 big-city theatres, anyway.)  It’s tempting, of course, to see this as […]

    THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – A Different Kind of Dream Team     Bear with me here. On Friday, Fox Searchlight will throw THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL directly into the path of the mega-buster that is The Avengers.  (Well, in 27 big-city theatres, anyway.)  It’s tempting, of course, […]