TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

  IT’S A DISASTER:  Worth A Ticket – And They Feel Just (More Or Less) Fine   IT’S A DISASTER is the movie Seeking A Friend For the End of the World aspired, but failed, to be:  a laugh-out-loud, throat-clutching comedy about catastrophe.  Disaster, which premiered at this year’s LA Film Festival, doesn’t yet have […]

    OUR IDIOT BROTHER – Watch It At Home:  Sitcom On A Big Screen   Although it premiered at Sundance, OUR IDIOT BROTHER was an “independent film” only in a technical sense:  it was produced on a relatively low budget and didn’t have US distribution in place.  (Harvey Weinstein picked it up at the […]

  X-MEN:  DAYS OF FUTURE PAST:  Buy A Ticket – For Once, The Script Is As Mighty As the CG After the money-making meatball that was Godzilla, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST serves welcome notice that a movie can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, be crammed with CG-generated spectacle, and still have room for an […]

  INTERSTELLAR:  Worth A Ticket – Christopher Nolan’s Imperfect Odyssey Remember A.I.: Artificial Intelligence?  It was the deeply odd sci-fi/fairy tale quasi-collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg, originated by Kubrick but rewritten and filmed by Spielberg (at Kubrick’s request) after Kubrick’s death.  Spielberg clearly meant it as a tribute to a great filmmaker and friend, but […]