R#J:  Every generation gets its Romeo & Juliet.  In Carey Williams’ R#J, the words of Shakespeare are only occasionally heard.  Instead, these extremely up-to-date Capulets and Montagues communicate almost exclusively over social media on their phones, and those screens are where the bulk of the film takes place.  As written by Williams, Rickie Castaneda and […]

  WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY (Roku – November 4):  A comic book fantasia of a celebrity “biography,” Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (co-written with Yankovic himself, who’s also one of the producers), takes some fragments about the parody musician’s life and work, and transforms them into a nonstop array of gags that […]

  THE BURIAL (MGM/Amazon – Oct. 13):  A yarn that’s also a true story.  Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) was the owner of a family-run, regional Mississippi business that for decades had offered funeral services and burial insurance to its customers.  When Jeremiah’s finances took a turn, he made a deal with a conglomerate headed […]

> See also: THE BIJOU @ TIFF:  FIRST TITLES ANNOUNCEDTHE BIJOU @ TIFF:  FESTIVAL TITLES, ROUND TWOTHE BIJOU @ TIFF:  O CANADIAN TITLES! The Toronto International Film Festival prides itself on being one of the more comprehensive in the world, and today a slew of additional titles were announced for next month’s TIFF.  After the […]

> Sundance announced the second group of its 2012 titles today (Competition entries were announced yesterday; Premieres will be unveiled on Monday), mostly in what are traditionally the most untraditional categories of the Festival:  Park City At Midnight, Next, and New Frontier. Also announced were the Spotlight films, which is where Sundance puts films that […]

  ON THE ROAD – Worth A Ticket – Kerouac’s Classic Is Beautiful and Atmospheric But Lacks Urgency ON THE ROAD, as a novel and now as a film adaptation, is so enmeshed with the mythology of the real-life people and events it thinly fictionalizes and with the many works, both documentary and fiction, it’s […]

  There are any number of ways the story of Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat could be told to make a potentially fascinating movie, from the sociological to the political, the personal to the satiric.  The laziest–one might even say the most cowardly–would be to simply repeat the events as they were originally presented to the public […]

  DALLAS BUYERS CLUB is more Erin Brockovich than Brian’s Song, and that’s why it works so well.  Jean-Marc Vallee’s film, written by Craig Borten and Melisa Walack, is too angry to be sentimental.  Set during the 1980s, it tells the story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey, in a career-highlight performance), a hard-living, homophobic Texas electrician and rodeo rider […]