THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN:  Not At Any Price – Should Have Been Pruned   When Disney decided to make THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN, it probably shouldn’t have put the word “odd” in the title.  Although I suppose it’s preferable to “weird” or “mildly creepy.” Timothy Green is the story of […]

  42:  Watch It At Home – The Hallmark Baseball Hall of Fame It may well be that 42 is the Jackie Robinson movie audiences want.  It’s a straightforward, handsomely-produced, inspirational telling of a genuinely uplifting story, the 1946-47 baseball seasons when Robinson (Chadwick Boseman) broke the color line in American baseball, first in the […]

    THE VOW:  Not Even For Free – Forget About It   This year has brought us a far-fetched, but ultimately moving and deeply romantic story about a couple who have finally gotten together and married after a great deal of turmoil and who then face their greatest challenge of all:  a fluke accident […]

>   Not At Any Price:  Phony As A 3-Dollar Bill THE ART OF GETTING BY (then called “Homework”) stood out at Sundance like an unsore thumb.  In the midst of high-quality, serious films that were at least trying to be about something (several of which will be opening later this summer), Art Of Getting […]

> Watch It At Home People complain that Hollywood doesn’t take risks, but Universal went and hired the director of Alvin and the Chipmunks to make a movie about a musical-minded, free-spirit digitally animated character who upturns the life of an ordinary guy… talk about pushing the envelope!  (In fairness, Alvin was a chipmunk singer, […]

    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, […]

  The old truism that Park City empties out during the second half of the Sundance Film Festival, making it possible to see all the hot titles that premiered at the festival’s start, is far less true than it used to be.  It was impossible to get into the festival’s big buy, The Way, Way […]

  TOP FIVE:  No Current US Distributor or Release Date (but that will change very soon) – Worth A Ticket Chris Rock is generally considered among the greatest stand-ups of his generation, and it’s been clear for some time that he wants to move up to the next cultural echelon, the level of regard where […]