STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS:  Worth A Ticket – Another Satisfying Trip On the Enterprise J.J. Abrams and his Bad Robot cohorts, writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, did a bang-up job rejuvenating the Star Trek franchise in 2009, and their first next journey where many, many have gone before, the new STAR TREK: INTO […]

  Like his Oscar-winning A Separation, Asghar Farhadi’s THE PAST is concerned with the abyss of uncertainty and mystery that lies under seemingly straightforward actions, the ever-increasing complications that become evident whenever one scrutinizes the events and motives of everyday life. Although the setting this time is Paris, and the characters aren’t the same, in many ways, The […]

  THE WOLF OF WALL STREET:  Buy A Ticket – Scorsese’s Boisterous Epic of Bottomless Greed The key sequence in Martin Scorsese’s THE WOLF OF WALL STREET arrives about 2 hours into its 3-hour length.  (No meaningful spoilers here.)  The resoundingly crooked financier Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his equally bent sidekick Donnie Azoff (Jonah […]

  NOAH:  Worth A Ticket –The Word According to Darren Aronofsky When Darren Aronofsky decided to follow Black Swan, the biggest hit of his career, with the story of Noah and the Ark, it seemed like a perverse choice.  Traditionally, the big-budget biblical epic has been among the blandest and most conservative of Hollywood genres, […]

  Natalie Portman certainly hasn’t made it easy for herself with her debut as a writer/director, A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS.  The film, which premiered at Cannes (but tellingly, doesn’t yet have a US distributor) before its first North American screening at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, is a period piece shot almost entirely […]

  NOVITIATE (Sony Classics):  It’s not clear how much of an audience there can be for a dark drama set amid the physical and psychological hardships of a pre-Vatican II midwestern abbey, but Margaret Betts’s Novitiate provides an utterly convincing insight into that world.  (Betts won a “breakthrough” directing award at the festival.)  The story […]

  PETERLOO (Amazon – November 9):  Not so much a movie as an illustrated historical recitation.  Mike Leigh’s film concerns the brutal 1819 government militia attack on civilians listening to a public address at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, which came to be known as “Peterloo” because the bloodshed was likened to the then-recent […]

  SAVE YOURSELVES! (no distrib):  A moderately amusing sketch that doesn’t quite have the heft for feature length.  Writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson satirize Brooklyn hipsters and sci-fi in their story of a couple, Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani), who’ve decided to ditch their devices and spend a week in a […]