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 […]

  BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR:  Buy A Ticket – A 3-Hour Deep Dive Into A Character’s Soul BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR is relentlessly, sometimes suffocatingly intimate.  By that I don’t mean its celebrated, lengthy (although simulated) sex scenes between lead characters Adele (Adele Exarchopolous) and Emma (Lea Seydoux), which have earned it an […]

  RISE OF THE GUARDIANS:  Worth a Ticket – “The Avengers” as Holiday Fantasy RISE OF THE GUARDIANS doesn’t entirely look or feel like what we’ve come to expect from DreamWorks Animation.  Under Peter Ramsey’s direction (his first feature), the images have a burnished, almost pewter-tinted glow, a glint of long-forgotten memory, very different from […]

  RUBY SPARKS:  Worth A Ticket – A Narrative Feat   Woody Allen is one of the most influential figures in modern independent film, but his ghost is usually evident in the many romantic comedy-dramas we get each year paying homage to Annie Hall and Manhattan, about hyper-intellectual big-city types who lurch in and out […]

  HER:  Buy A Ticket – Tetrabytes of Love From Spike Jonze HER, which was presented at the AFI Film Festival before opening in theatres next month, is the first film Spike Jonze has directed from his own original script, and although its inventiveness recalls Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., the projects on which he collaborated […]

  PEOPLE LIKE US:  Watch It At Home – Not The First Movie Like This   Sam Harper (Chris Pine) is a guy we’ve met before.  He’s the fast-talking, self-absorbed hustler who gets along in life by sheer nerve, and doesn’t really care about anyone else.  He needs to open himself up to the problems […]

  LIFE OF PI:  Worth A Ticket – A Floating Display of Visual Marvels A boy and a Bengal tiger get into a lifeboat… The digital paintbox now available to filmmakers provides an almost limitless variety of visual possibilities, and also a certain amount of temptation, because like any resource, it can be overused.  Ang […]

  SAVING MR. BANKS:  Buy A Ticket – Positively Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious SAVING MR. BANKS , which screened at the AFI Film Festival in Los Angeles last night before opening in theaters next month, is a moviegoer’s dream of Hollywood popular art, superbly melding history, personality, humor, sentiment and glitz with little fault or sign of strain.  […]