TAMMY:  Not Even For Free – Melissa McCarthy Fumbles Her Industry Clout When a star earns hundreds of millions of dollars for Hollywood, it can show its appreciation by handing over the creative reins to the star (on a modest budget), allowing him or her to realize a “passion project.”  That’s where Melissa McCarthy […]

  TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Not Even For Free – Hollywood’s Blockbuster Mentality To the Max Here are just a few of the epic movies with running times shorter than the 165 minutes of TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION:  Apocalypse Now, Avatar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Bridge On the River Kwai, Boogie Nights and Empire […]

  JERSEY BOYS:  Watch It At Home – Clint Eastwood Directing the Broadway Hit Is As Weird As It Sounds No one will mistake the combination of Clint Eastwood and JERSEY BOYS for the fortuitous collision of chocolate and peanut-butter.  Some of Eastwood’s strongest tendencies as a filmmaker–admirable in the right context–fit badly here, and the result is […]

  HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2:  Worth A Ticket – Bigger Isn’t Always Better, But Still Good Enough Like a lot of sequels animated and not, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2 has been conceived on a much more spectacular scale than its predecessor, and as it’s become a bigger and more conventional action-adventure, […]

  EDGE OF TOMORROW:  Watch It At Home – Needed To Hit Reset One More Time There’s a lot of inventiveness in EDGE OF TOMORROW, which combines the premise of Groundhog Day with a War of the Worlds-like plot–certainly more than the usual for a mega-budgeted Hollywood summer action movie.  That keeps it compelling for […]

  THE FAULT IN OUR STARS:  Worth A Ticket – John Green’s Beloved Book Is Well Treated By the Screen It’s almost impossible to describe the plot of John Green’s YA novel THE FAULT IN OUR STARS without making it sounding precious and shamelessly sentimental.  Erich Segal’s Love Story, the giant hit and instant self-parody […]

  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 retro, even conservative sense of humor.  For all the many, many four-letter words in A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, and […]

  MALEFICENT:  Watch It At Home – Only Jolie Casts a Spell The conflicting agendas driving the new MALEFICENT don’t leave much room for the movie itself.  Like Wicked and Once Upon A Time, it’s a revisionist fairy tale, specifically one that casts a sympathetic, proto-feminist eye on an iconic evil sorceress.  But it’s also […]