STATE OF THE UNION (Sundance Channel):  The lines between narrative visual media continue to blur, and State Of the Union is an A-list talent contribution to a genre that doesn’t exactly exist yet.  It’s a story told in ten 10-minute episodes, all of them written by the novelist and screenwriter Nick Hornby and directed […]

  GRAND HOTEL:  Monday 10PM on ABC ABC’s cardboard summer soap GRAND HOTEL is set at a resort hotel in Miami that isn’t as much fun as the one in Jane the Virgin.  This one has a standard-issue set of crises:  the hotel is bankrupt, its owner Santiago Mendoza (Demian Bichir) in debt to shady […]

  THE FATHER (Sony Classics – TBD):  It’s probably foolhardy to start making predictions about next year’s Oscars when this year’s haven’t even been handed out yet, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Anthony Hopkins’s performance in The Father won’t be a major part of the Best Actor conversation.  It’s a showcase role, […]

  ON THE COUNT OF THREE:  There was a well-deserved Sundance screenwriting prize for Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s script for Jerrod Carmichael’s big-screen directing debut, which threads an almost impossible needle as a comedy about suicidal depression.  (In an unintentional way, the film is a companion piece to the festival’s How It Ends, also […]

  BROS (Universal – Sept. 30):  Notwithstanding its occasional meta self-deprecation, it’s clear that Nicholas Stoller and Billy Eichner (both writer/producers and respectively director and star) want Bros to be Hollywood’s first mainstream big-screen gay rom-com hit.  It’s fitting in a way, then, that like so many straight rom-coms before it, Bros suffers from third […]

  IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE (Netflix – TBD):  The biggest sale of the festival as of this writing–a $17M paycheck from Netflix–was its most dynamite entertainment.  Greg Jardin’s feature writing/directing debut feels like Bodies Bodies Bodies was given an injection of The Last of Sheila‘s brains.  Note:  Jardin has asked that his central plot mechanism not be spoiled, which […]

> MIRROR MIRROR:  Not Even For Free – 7 Years Bad Luck When it was announced that 2012 would bring two big-budget movie versions of the Snow White story, not to mention TV’s Once Upon A Time, in which Snow (Ginnifer Goodwin) is a central character (and that’s not counting Grimm, another fairy tale series […]

  TRAIN DREAMS (Netflix – TBD):  Train Dreams was one of only two films acquired for wide distribution during Sundance, and while Netflix clearly regards it as an awards contender, barring overwhelming critical support 9 months from now, it’s hard to see Clint Bentley’s quiet historical saga achieving a major impact among the mountains of […]