This was a Toronto Film Festival unlike any other, and not just because I “attended” it from the laptop in my house. Toronto has become an important stop on the road to the Academy Awards, with 9 of the pas...
Viewed in its 10-hour entirety, THE YOUNG POPE encompassed much of the good and bad of Auteur TV. HBO, by all appearances, wrote a (very large) check to the arthouse filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino as creator, director and ...
SIDE EFFECTS: Watch It On TV – Soderbergh’s Final Big-Screen Film (For Now) Isn’t His Best Steven Soderbergh’s announcement that with SIDE EFFECTS, his career as a director of movies produced to...
BEAUTIFUL BOY (Amazon/October 12): A true-life story of drug addiction told with sincerity and superb acting, but which can’t shake the feel of generic problem drama. Felix Van Groeningen’s film (co-writt...
THE NEST (no distrib): Sean Durkin’s first feature since 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene presents its emotions with such high-intensity beams that it often feels as though the film is going to slip into the...
SHERLOCK HOLMES: GAME OF SHADOWS: Watch It At Home – Far Too Elementary We have to come to terms with the fact that an entire generation may recognize the name Sherlock Holmes not as the template ...
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 b...
THE YOUNG POPE: Sunday/Monday 9PM on HBO – DVR Alert The cinema-tization of television continues with HBO’s THE YOUNG POPE. It’s been created and directed by the filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino, who made...