ShowbuzzDaily Sundance Film Festival Reviews: “American Animals” & “The Kindergarten Teacher”
AMERICAN ANIMALS (no distrib): It’s not easy to come up with a new spin on the venerable heist movie genre, but writer/director Bart Layton has managed just that with American Animals. Layton had been until now...
THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “21 Jump Street”
21 JUMP STREET: Watch It At Home – High School Meta-Bromance The meta-ization of contemporary comedy marches on: Community, of course, is a virtual meta-kingdom, but Happy Endings makes Friends jokes, th...
TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL Day 1 Capsule Reviews: “The Magnificent 7″” & “Free Fire”
THE MAGNIFICENT 7 (Village Roadshow/MGM/Columbia/Sony – Sept 23): Cinema survived in 1960 when Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece The Seven Samurai was transformed into an American western, and it will survive th...
THE SKED Fall Pilot Report: ABC’s “Selfie”
SELFIE: Tuesday 8PM on ABC starting September 30 – If Nothing Else Is On… PLAYERS: George Bernard Shaw. (And Lerner & Loewe, whose My Fair Lady made Pygmalion into a fixture of pop culture.) Serie...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Sundance Film Festival Reviews: “After the Wedding” & “Adam”
AFTER THE WEDDING (no distrib): The Danish 2006 After the Wedding, which won that year’s Best Foreign Film Oscar, was shot by director Suzanne Biers in the then-trendy Dogma style, heavy on pseudo-verite camerawo...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Series Premiere Review: “Lethal Weapon”
LETHAL WEAPON: Wednesday 8PM on FOX – Change the Channel By the time the LETHAL WEAPON movie franchise reached its 4th installment, it was virtually a TV series anyway, so there’s no reason for moral outrag...
THE SHOWBUZZDAILY REVIEW: “Footloose”
FOOTLOOSE: Watch It At Home – Faithfully Reproduces the Original For Good and Bad 1980s week at the multiplex continues with a remake of FOOTLOOSE, a trip back to the territory of Herbert Ross’s 1984...
THE BIJOU @ TIFF: Midnight Madness – “Sleepless Night”
> When the inevitable US remake of the French thriller SLEEPLESS NIGHT arrives, it’ll benefit from some sharper dialogue (assuming the subtitles in Toronto were fully translating the original), a bit more characterization...
THE SKED PREMIERE REVIEW: “Bonnie & Clyde”
BONNIE & CLYDE: Concludes Monday 9PM on Lifetime/A&E/History It’s been 46 years since the classic movie, and besides, plenty of historical events and figures have been the subjects of multiple productions...
SHOWBUZZDAILY Toronto Film Festival Reviews: “A Star Is Born” & “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
A STAR IS BORN (Warners – October 5): Bradley Cooper, making his directing debut, decided to do the equivalent of a first-time weightlifter starting out with a 400-pound barbell. It isn’t just that A Star...
SHOWBUZZDAILY @ TORONTO: “Passion”
It’s unfortunately not saying very much to note that PASSION is the best eeffort Brian DePalma has managed to turn in lately. DePalma’s Redacted was one of the worst films by a major American director in recent...
ARTHUR: 12-Step Programmer
> Watch It At Home. Were the executives at Warner Bros so desperate to be in business with Russell Brand that they huddled together in a conference room one day, frantically going through their library titles in search of alcoh...
THE SKED Premiere Review: “Rosemary’s Baby” (Part 1)
No one could seriously imagine that the TV remake of ROSEMARY’S BABY would come close to Roman Polanski’s 1968 masterpiece, so let’s get the obvious over with in a single paragraph. (The amazing thing...