DEAD MAN DOWN:  Watch It At Home – Effectively Moody Tale of Revenge Until its final reel, when it arrives pretty much where you thought it was going to go from the very start, and in a way even dumber than you expected, DEAD MAN DOWN is a surprisingly rich B-movie in a movie […]

  HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS:  Not At Any Price – Audiences Won’t Live Happily Ever After HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS is mostly terrible, but say this for it:  it’s not terrible like anything else out there.  If you’ve always wanted to see an R-rated, gore-ridden, smart-alecky anachronistic fantasy in which fairy tale characters […]

With the notable exception of Friday Night Lights, Hollywood has rarely even attempted a serious depiction of life in the American heartland in recent years.  More often, the center of the country is a setting for stories of random violence or bland, heartwarming family values.  In his fourth feature film, AT ANY PRICE, director Ramin Bahrani, […]

  TRANCE:  Watch It At Home – Tricky But Unsatisfying Thriller From Danny Boyle TRANCE is both extremely clever and remarkably stupid.  I wish I could explain exactly how, but Danny Boyle’s thriller, written by John Hodge and Joe Ahearne, has the kind of story that piles reversals on twists on reveals, so there’s not […]

> Watch It At Home People complain that Hollywood doesn’t take risks, but Universal went and hired the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks to make a movie about a musical-minded, free-spirit digitally animated character who upturns the life of an ordinary guy… talk about pushing the envelope!  (In fairness, Alvin was a chipmunk singer, […]

>    Worth A Ticket:  Grade It On A Curve In 1999, Jake Kasdan directed a project set in high school that starred Jason Segel and featured Dave (Gruber) Allen in its ensemble; it was called Freaks and Geeks, and it has its own special place in pop culture history.   His new BAD TEACHER… […]

  THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL:  Worth A Ticket – Wes Anderson’s Latest Fancy Box Has Something Inside Where has the “Academy” 1.37:1 screen aspect ratio been all of Wes Anderson’s life?  One of Anderson’s visual motifs (some would say “fetishes”) is to photograph his actors enclosed in windows, doorways, or other pieces of production design, […]

> It stood to reason that if anyone was going to figure out how to effectively convert standard 35mm to 3D, it would be James Cameron. Cameron, whose Avatar is singlehandedly responsible for creating the current 3D frenzy, has spent more than a year and $18M to go back 15 years and transfer his 1997 […]