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, […]

> Watch It At Home:  The God of Thunder Musters a Tinny Roar. Put it this way:  the new superhero epic THOR cost something like $150M to produce, required the diligent services of hundreds of professionals over a period of 2 years, is being presented with all the trappings of IMAX, 3D and super-stereo, and […]

> THE CHANGE UP – Watch It At Home:  Cliches with Dirty Words Are Still Cliches There have been plenty of R-rated comedies this summer–a bumper crop, really–but none more fully committed to raunch than THE CHANGE-UP.  The script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore (they wrote The Hangover, but also Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) […]

 Not At Any Price:  “Art” More Than Art   The name Monte Hellman doesn’t mean much to the vast majority of moviegoers, but Hellman is among the cultiest of American cult directors.  He came up the Roger Corman path in the 1960s with Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper (his films from that era include The […]

REAL STEEL:  Watch It At Home – The Word is “Clunky”   REAL STEEL wants to be loved so much, it practically walks the audience members to their cars and offers to give them all a lift home.  And yet, the packed house I saw it with could only offer the movie a smattering of […]

  Sundance is sometimes thrilling, but it can also be an ordeal.  Especially when the films are good, but not great.  And even more so if you arrive with limited tickets, and are left to the tender mercies of the Wait List lines (which, given Sundance’s idiosyncratic approach to Wait Lists, requires standing on each […]

  RUBY SPARKS:  Worth A Ticket – A Narrative Feat   Woody Allen is one of the most influential figures in modern independent film, but his ghost is usually evident in the many romantic comedy-dramas we get each year paying homage to Annie Hall and Manhattan, about hyper-intellectual big-city types who lurch in and out […]

As soon as Robert Redford had enough clout to start generating his own movies, he began starring in and often producing some of the best politically-themed films of the 1970s, including The Candidate, Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men.  Laudably, in this latter portion of his career, he’s continued to be one of the […]