MEN IN BLACK 3:  Watch It At Home – $250M Worth of “OK”   After years of development, a famously troubled production, untold rewrites and a budget that even Sony admits is around $250M (meaning $400M+ with marketing), MEN IN BLACK 3 is… fine.  Proficient and professional, neither inspired nor demanding, containing a few chuckles, […]

  STAR-CROSSED:  Monday 8PM on CW – Change the Channel If aliens are in high school, we must be on CW.  The network’s midseason entry STAR-CROSSED plays as a clip reel of CW’s greatest hits, from the supernatural teen romance of The Vampire Diaries to the forbidden love of Beauty and the Beast to the […]

  I AM MOTHER (no distrib):  Grant Sputore’s impressively controlled first feature brings us back to the post-apocalypse.  In Michael Lloyd Green’s script, it appears as though the only surviving remnant of humanity is an unnamed girl (Clara Rugaard as a teen) raised from a fetus by a maternal robot (voiced by Rose Byrne).  Mother […]

  Star power makes all the difference  in THE SKELETON TWINS.  Craig Johnson’s dramedy (written with Mark Heyman) takes place in fairly commonplace territory, especially at Sundance:  siblings bound together, whether they like it or not, by embittered love and old family scars.  What isn’t expected, though, is for those roles to be filled by SNL alumni Kristen […]

  ANNA KARENINA – Watch It At Home – Beautiful But Overconceptualized Version of the Tolstoy Classic Joe Wright was introduced to the world with his film of Pride and Prejudice, and it seems like he’s been trying to escape the pigeonhole of staid Literary Classics director ever since. His Atonement, while based on another celebrated novel, […]

  In contrast to last week’s Kristin Wiig-fest, tonight’s season finale of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE didn’t give victory laps to all the franchise characters Bill Hader and Fred Armisen have contributed to the show over their 8 and 11 seasons.  (And, praise God, it didn’t give them both a last “The Californians” sketch.)  Instead, each […]

  THIS IS 40 – Watch It At Home – Judd Apatow’s Midlife Crisis Comedy-Drama is Both Ambitious and Bland As Judd Apatow has matured as a filmmaker, he’s staked out a piece of territory that’s original but not necessarily workable:  he wants to be both the Paul Mazursky and the John Cassavetes of sitcom showrunners. Although […]

  Only in the world of RAY DONOVAN would a season’s (more or less) happy ending commence with the chainsaw dismemberment of corpses, but that’s Showtime’s twisted family saga.  The headline of Season 6 was the show’s relocation from Los Angeles to New York, which hardly seemed affect its DNA at all.  In fact, at […]