THE RAVEN: Watch It At Home – Not Much Tell-Tale Heart (Or Brain) Sometimes less-than-great minds think alike, too. The idea of Edgar Allen Poe as a detective investigating strange phenomena was at the center of ABC’s busted pilot Poe last year (see our pilot report here), but it seems the […]
CAPTAIN PHILLIPS: Order Tickets Now – Exceptionally Taut, Intelligent Real-Life Thriller Paul Greenglass is a master of capturing pulse-pounding immediacy on film, and for most directors that would be enough. Hollywood would be more than happy to back a money truck up to his door and have him churn out nothing but additional Bourne […]
THIS IS THE END: Worth A Ticket – Apocalypse Right Now Imagine an dystopian mumblecore extravaganza populated mostly by the Judd Apatow stock company, and you’ll have an idea of what to expect from THIS IS THE END. Almost inevitably self-indulgent and uneven, the directing debut of Seth Rogen and his writing partner/BFF Evan […]
BIRDMAN or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance): Worth A Ticket – A Stunt, But An Amazing One Alejandro G. Inarritu’s BIRDMAN is, like this year’s Boyhood, a film defined by its form. In the case of Boyhood, that form was inextricable from its content: its depiction of the passage of time, and the experience […]
ROCK OF AGES: Watch It At Home – Stop Believin’ No one expects finesse from a movie musical constructed out of songs by Journey, Twisted Sister and Def Leppard. And, to be certain, the hair-band era of the 80s wasn’t known for its “less is more” aesthetic. But Adam Shankman’s jukebox musical Glee-ish movie […]
OBLIVION: Worth A Ticket – Dramatically Uneven, But Visually Spectacular OBLIVION is amazing to look at. Even though it takes place in the same post-apocalyptic landscape where movie and TV audiences seem to spend most of their time these days, the director Joseph Kosinski and his cinematographer Claudio Miranda (he just won the Oscar […]
THE WATCH: Not At Any Price – Do the Stars a Favor: Don’t Watch Some terrible movies surprise and disappoint, but you could see THE WATCH coming for weeks. The increasingly desperate marketing campaign told the story–it’s a buddy comedy! it’s a sci-fi comedy! it’s a buddy comedy and a sci-fi comedy!–as did the panicky […]
LOLA VERSUS: Watch It At Home – An Unmemorable Woman LOLA VERSUS‘ ambition is pretty clear: it wants to be the 2012 version of Paul Mazursky’s 1978 comedy-drama AN UNMARRIED WOMAN, which is to say covering all the bases except the “married” part. We meet Lola (Greta Gerwig) on her 29th birthday, and she […]