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 […]

  PALM TREES AND POWER LINES (no distrib):  Jamie Dack’s first feature film (from a script written with Audrey Findlay) means to unsettle, and it does.  17-year old Lea (Lily McInerny) is stuck in a dead-end Southern California beach town at the end of summer with a distracted single mom (Gretchen Mol) and friends whose […]

  HIT MAN (no distrib):  A clever, funny, sexy entertainment from Richard Linklater and emerging star Glen Powell, who co-wrote the script with the director (both also produced), inspired by an already-wild true story.  Powell plays Gary Johnson, a philosophy teacher moonlighting as a consultant for a local Texas police department.  He’s supposed to be […]

  The 2025 Sundance Film Festival is still going on, and will continue through February 2.  However, at this point all the major titles have premiered, and the at-home part of the festival has kicked in, so it seems fair to say that it was a fairly dispiriting edition, especially for those who judge Sundance […]