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, this week’s 30 Rock undercut what appeared to be its own sentimental ending with jokes poking at viewers who might like sentimental […]
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT: Watch It At Home – Tom Clancy’s Hero Is Plugged Into A Routine Action Movie The fourth movie incarnation of Tom Clancy’s emblematic hero Jack Ryan (in 5 films) finds him much diminished. Ryan was introduced in Clancy’s first novel, The Hunt For Red October, in 1984, which was filmed […]
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 LUCKY ONE: Watch It At Home – Not If The One Is In The Audience Zac Efron has been working out, and he wants you to know it. Efron’s new biceps and abs are on frequent display in THE LUCKY ONE, often shiny with sweat and otherwise photographed by director Scott […]
As has been generally reported, this year’s Toronto Film Festival wasn’t a dominant one, lacking the kind of overwhelming favorites that The King’s Speech and Argo have been in recent years. Some potentially major upcoming films chose to screen at other festivals (Birdman at Venice, Gone Girl and Inherent Vice in New York), while […]
Sundance is sometimes thrilling, but it can also be an ordeal. Especially when the films are good, but not great. And even more so if you arrive with limited tickets, and are left to the tender mercies of the Wait List lines (which, given Sundance’s idiosyncratic approach to Wait Lists, requires standing on each […]
> Pawel Pawlikowski is a filmmaker whose name deserves to be better known: his films Last Resort and My Summer of Love are small but beautifully realized stories of intricate human emotion. His new picture The Woman In the Fifth, is in a somewhat different mode, edging toward genre, but it continues to display his […]
ROBOCOP: Watch It At Home – A Tinny Remake This weekend’s movie openings feature no less than 3 remakes of 1980s hits, with new versions of ROBOCOP, About Last Night and Endless Love arriving at once, but it’s just as notable that all three were R-rated in their original forms, and two have now […]