The allegory is piled on so thickly in Yorgos Lanthimos’ THE LOBSTER that after a while, it’s not clear just what the underlying subject is supposed to be.  Lanthimos is a cult-favorite filmmaker (the cult mostly consists of critics and film festival selection committee members) whose arresting Dogtooth was an unlikely Best Foreign Film […]

  Virtually every screening at Sundance is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker, and while these sessions can be informative and charming (although 3 questions that need never be asked again are How long did you shoot?  What was the budget? and How much was improvised?), they can also be quite sad.  Watching them, […]

  THE GUARD – Worth A Ticket:  The Art of Performance, Crispy and Well-Done   I don’t know that there’s an actor in movies today more fun to watch than Brendan Gleeson.  Gleeson is probably best known for playing Mad-Eye Moody in several of the Harry Potter movies, but he’s been giving sensational performances since […]

  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, […]

  COME SUNDAY (Netflix):  American films that feature religious figures tend to come in two varieties:  the cloying “faith-based” dramas that play quite literally to the choir, and the “edgy” films in which the supposedly pious are revealed to be hypocritical and often evil frauds.  Joshua Marston’s Come Sunday is a rarity, a film that […]

ROCK OF AGES:  Watch It At Home – Stop Believin’   No one expects finesse from a movie musical constructed out of songs by Journey, Twisted Sister and Def Leppard.  And, to be certain, the hair-band era of the 80s wasn’t known for its “less is more” aesthetic.  But Adam Shankman’s jukebox musical Glee-ish movie […]

  It isn’t often that one needs to invoke Intolerance to describe a current film, but CLOUD ATLAS demands it.  Like D.W. Griffith’s epic, it intercuts between stories taking place across hundreds of years of human experience–in this case, from the 19th to the 23rd centuries–in order to tell a larger, inspirational story about destiny and freedom.  Although […]

> Reviews of some of the more prominent movies in theatres right now: X-MEN:  FIRST CLASS MIDNIGHT IN PARIS THE HANGOVER PART II KUNG FU PANDA 2 THE TREE OF LIFE