Posts Tagged ‘film review’
 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY SUNDANCE REVIEW: “The Sleepwalker”

  For SHOWBUZZDAILY’s full set of Sundance capsule reviews, click here.   What kind of filmmaker does Mona Fastvold want to be?  It’s an existential question that comes up often at Sundance, where artisti...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “The Program”

  THE PROGRAM feels entirely useless.  With an authoritative documentary about the Lance Armstrong story already in wide distribution (Alex Gibney’s excellent The Armstrong Lie), the only reason to attempt a scripte...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW: “Under the Skin”

  A film festival is certainly the place for a feature-length semi-linear flow of unscripted dialogue and bizarre imagery if anywhere is, so welcome to UNDER THE SKIN.  The writer/director Jonathan Glazer has gradually b...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY SUNDANCE REVIEW: “Happy Christmas”

  Joe Swanberg, the director, writer and co-star of HAPPY CHRISTMAS, which premiered at Sundance earlier this week, makes Woody Allen look lazy.  He’s had something like a dozen features to his credit since the sta...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “Sicario”

  The director Denis Villenueve has been staking out some interesting Hollywood territory for himself.  His new SICARIO, which debuted at Cannes and screened at the Toronto Film Festival prior to arriving in theatres next...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Ender’s Game”

  ENDER’S GAME:  Watch It At Home – Breaks The Rules, But Doesn’t Win the Game You don’t often see a $110M (plus marketing) YA adventure, intended to kick off a new movie franchise, as resolutely o...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY FILM REVIEW: “Winter’s Tale”

  WINTER’S TALE:  Not Even For Free – 2 Hours of Thin Tinsel The new movie WINTER’S TALE makes one ponder the phrase “labor of love.”  It marks the feature directing debut of the enormously ...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

ShowbuzzDaily Sundance Film Festival Review: “Colette”

  COLETTE (no distrib):  These days, the early 20th Century French writer known as Colette is remembered mostly if at all for having written the story that became the musical Gigi, but her own life proves to be remarkably...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto 2014 Review: “This Is Where I Leave You”

  THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU (Warners) – Opens September 19 – Worth A Ticket Jonathan Tropper’s very successful day job is writing seriocomic novels about families and romance that are distinguished by the...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “I Saw the Light”

  Marc Abraham, for his second film as director (prior to that, he was a veteran producer), has chosen his second consecutive mid-20th-century biography, following 2008’s Flash of Genius with I SAW THE LIGHT, which p...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “Truth”

  The screenwriter James Vanderbilt has made his directing debut with TRUTH, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival tonight, and at times it’s clear that this is a writer’s movie:  Vanderbilt gives no fe...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Review: “A Tale of Love and Darkness”

  Natalie Portman certainly hasn’t made it easy for herself with her debut as a writer/director, A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS.  The film, which premiered at Cannes (but tellingly, doesn’t yet have a US distribu...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW: “Tracks”

  There’s no cutesiness to be found in John Curran’s film TRACKS, a bracingly non-Disneyfied true-life nature tale.  In the mid-1970s, a young Australian woman named Robyn Davidson decided to walk across almo...
by Mitch Salem
 

 
 

SHOWBUZZDAILY Film Review: “A Million Ways To Die In the West”

  A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST:  Not Even For Free – They Don’t Include “Die Laughing” Seth MacFarlane, out from behind his high-concept animated and fantasy premises, has a surprisingly retr...
by Mitch Salem
 

 

 

TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW: “Rush”

  The writer Peter Morgan is a whiz at boring into little-remembered (and in the US, sometimes little-known) crannies of recent history and scooping out the rich drama inside, with scripts like The Deal, Frost/Nixon and Th...
by Mitch Salem