THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release):  The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage.  A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened.  That makes The Eyes of […]

> SOURCE CODE is this weekend’s major live-action opening, so here’s a look at some recent work by its star Jake Gyllenhaal and its director Duncan Jones. Gyllenhaal has had a curious Hollywood career thus far, and PRINCE OF PERSIA:  THE SANDS OF TIME, far from his most auspicious moment, was his first pre-Source Code […]

> Josh Radnor’s writing/directing debut happythankyoumoreplease, which played Sundance a couple of years ago, was a promising, entertaining NY-set romantic comedy-drama that hailed from the Woody Allen division of indie film. His second film LIBERAL ARTS, which premiered last night at the festival, still sips from the fount of Woody (in this case, particularly from […]

  THE BRONZE is an entertaining but standard-issue R-rated American comedy, equal parts Bad Teacher and any Danny McBride vehicle, which makes one wonder what it’s doing in the Dramatic Competition line-up at the Sundance Film Festival.  (McBride’s breakout movie The Foot Fist Way also premiered at Sundance, but in the more genre-oriented Midnight section.)  Another similarity to […]

  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 […]

  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, […]

  BEAUTIFUL BOY (Amazon/October 12):  A true-life story of drug addiction told with sincerity and superb acting, but which can’t shake the feel of generic problem drama.  Felix Van Groeningen’s film (co-written with Luke Davies) is based on parallel memoirs by recovering addict Nic Sheff (played most of the time by It Boy Timothee Chalomet) […]

  But for one unfortunately critical element, Logan and Noah Miller’s SWEETWATER (the brothers rewrote a script originally by Andrew McKenzie) is a highly enjoyable darkly comic western, as subsumed in stylized movie traditions (and their subversion) as a Tarantino movie, but without Tarantino’s post-modern stew of references. Sweetwater is your basic frontier town, half-way to Santa […]