THE MONUMENTS MEN:  Watch It At Home – George Clooney’s Film Is No Classic Work of Art George Clooney’s THE MONUMENTS MEN is a startlingly complete failure.  It’s Clooney’s fifth film behind the camera (after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night, and Good Luck., Leatherheads, and The Ides of March), but it’s the […]

  THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART I:  Worth A Ticket – Half a Good Movie Is Still Half a Movie As big-screen and small-screen entertainment experiences have begun to merge, there’s been an increase in serialized franchise storytelling–super-expensive mega-movies turned into regularly scheduled series.  Sequels, of course, have always been with us, but through the […]

> Sundance has a thriving Park City At Midnight program that features plenty of high-octane horror movies, but the most unnerving and disturbing film of this year’s festival may have been Craig Zobel’s COMPLIANCE, a low-key drama based (apparently rather closely) on a true story without any hacked-off limbs or hint of the supernatural. In […]

  THE FIVE-YEAR ENGAGEMENT:  Watch It At Home – If Only The Engagement Were A Little Shorter…   Judd Apatow, as both director (The 40=Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) and producer (Bridesmaids, Superbad, Pineapple Express, TV’s new Girls) has brought a tremendous amount of first-class comedy to large and small screens in recent years.  But […]

  TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE:  Worth A Ticket – Another Late Autumn Role for Clint Think of TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE as Million Dollar Baby Lite.  Again we have the cranky older man (Clint Eastwood, this time a baseball scout instead of a boxing trainer) dealing with a feisty, stubborn young woman (Amy Adams as […]

  GANGSTER SQUAD – Watch It At Home – Snappy, Violent and Completely Vacuous Watching the new GANGSTER SQUAD is a bit like checking into one of those giant Vegas theme park hotels and expecting to find yourself in the real Rome, Venice or Paris:  the place is luxurious, but utterly fake.  The director Ruben […]

  MAN OF STEEL:  Watch It At Home – Another Guy In a Cape “Kneel before Zod!” the villain of that name roared in what’s probably the best-remembered piece of dialogue from Superman 2.  That line isn’t in the new MAN OF STEEL, but its filmmakers seem at times to have incorporated it into their attitude toward […]

  LONE SURVIVOR:  Buy A Ticket – A Powerfully Visceral Tale of War Peter Berg’s LONE SURVIVOR, which was shown at the AFI Film Festival tonight in advance of its release late next month, is a docudrama in the truest sense:  based on the memoir by Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, it exists with one aim […]