> Although Sundance still has several days to go, and surprises could spring up at any time (yesterday The Surrogate, a drama with John Hawkes as a man in an iron lung who decides to lose his virginity to a sex therapist played by Helen Hunt, came out of nowhere to win a huge $6M […]

  THE THREE STOOGES:  Watch It At Home – More Nyuks Than You’d Expect   The Farrelly Brothers’ THE THREE STOOGES is better than its marketing campaign let on, and while that would be more impressive if the trailer and ad materials hadn’t been almost unwatchably bad, it still makes for a welcome relief.  The […]

  This year’s Toronto International Film Festival had a very solid line-up, so much so that although the titles below are listed in rough order of preference, even the worst of them is of some interest, very possibly worth seeing for those intrigued by the genre or filmmaker.  The Festival, as has been the case […]

  Showbuzzdaily’s Top 10 Films of 2012 can be found here, and the Worst 10 are here.  But there were other movies this year worth remembering: HONORABLE MENTIONS CLOUD ATLAS (Warners – October – written and directed by Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski and Tom Tykwer): An impossibly ambitious epic that was thrilling when it worked. […]

  THE PURGE:  Watch It At Home – Dopey, Violent Allegory Nevertheless Packs a Punch THE PURGE is heavy-handed, borderline reprehensible nonsense–but that’s not to say it doesn’t work.  James DeMonaco’s trim (85 minutes, including credits) thriller is set in 2022, when virtually all crime and unemployment has been wiped out in a newly-restored United […]

  DIVERGENT:  Watch It At Home – Not Hungry Enough The film of DIVERGENT, even more than Veronica Roth’s YA-franchise source novel, is determined to resemble The Hunger Games as much as any movie can that’s telling a different story with a different set of characters.  (Not an illogical thing to do, considering that the […]

  MISS AMERICANA (Netflix – January 31):  There are certainly areas of Taylor Swift’s life that are carefully elided in MISS AMERICANA (her actor boyfriend’s face and name are absent, for example, and there’s no mention of Cats), and Lana Wilson’s documentary culminates in an inspirational push that is very much on-message with Swift’s latest […]

  THE DICTATOR:  Watch It At Home – Little Shock, No Awe   With Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen made one of the noisiest splashes into movie stardom of the past decade, daring and distinctive.  The question was whether he could follow it up.  And the answer, based on Bruno and the new THE DICTATOR, is […]