ENDLESS LOVE:  Not Even For Free – Hopeless Wreck Truly:  why does this new ENDLESS LOVE exist?  Even on the crassest commercial level, it makes very little sense.  The 1981 Franco Zeffirelli/Brooke Shields/Martin Hewitt version is remembered as neither good nor particularly successful (it made only half as much as Shields’ Blue Lagoon had […]

  THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES –  Not Even For Free –  An Incoherent Compendium of YA Tropes THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES isn’t so much a movie as it is a mash-up.  They’re all here, crammed into 130 minutes of screen time–Twilight and Harry Potter and Buffy and True Blood and even […]

  As a movie year, 2013 was awfully slow in getting started.  Hardly anything worth remembering opened all winter and spring–only 1 movie in the Top 10 below opened in theatres before late May.  Summer brought some relief, and then the film festival season that began at the end of August opened the doors wide […]

  JACK THE GIANT SLAYER:  Watch It At Home – No Giants Here It’s been a dozen years since moviegoers took up residence in Middle Earth with the opening of the first Lord of the Rings film, and since the multi-billion dollar success of that franchise, Hollywood has refused to let us leave.  Apart from […]

  THE HEAT:  Watch It At Home – A Functional Vehicle for Two Strong Stars Let’s face it:  it doesn’t really matter what THE HEAT is about.  A streetwise Boston cop, a straight-laced FBI agent, some crimes that need solving, teamwork imposed on the pair, hostility that turns gradually into friendship, a few mutual life […]

  THE COUNSELOR:  Not Even For Free – A Deluxe Pedigree, But Only Cut-Rate Nihilism The first “uh-oh” moment in THE COUNSELOR comes early, perhaps 10 minutes in.  We’ve barely been introduced to Reiner (Javier Bardem, genially dissolute, his hair spiky this time) and his lover Malkina (Cameron Diaz, speaking with an on-again, off-again sultry […]

  ALEX CROSS – Not At Any Price – A Pilot For A Show You Wouldn’t Watch ALEX CROSS is as generic as a cop movie can be–it’s a few commercial breaks away from airing on CBS or TNT–but there’s been a certain fascination about it since it was announced that the lead role would […]

‎ Jacques Audiard doesn’t do sentimental. His last film, A Prophet, had the clear-eyed view of crime and the dramatic heft of a French version of “The Wire,” and his new and very different drama RUST & BONE benefits as well from his refusal to take the road of easy emotion. Lord knows, the bare […]