THE GOOD HOUSE (DreamWorks – TBD):  By my count, it’s been two full decades since Sigourney Weaver was at the center of a feature film (that was Heartbreakers, where she shared the spotlight with Jennifer Love Hewitt), and that says an unfortunate amount about the American movie industry.  So even though Maya Forbes and […]

> Josh Radnor’s writing/directing debut happythankyoumoreplease, which played Sundance a couple of years ago, was a promising, entertaining NY-set romantic comedy-drama that hailed from the Woody Allen division of indie film. His second film LIBERAL ARTS, which premiered last night at the festival, still sips from the fount of Woody (in this case, particularly from […]

> If Arthur Schnitzler had only been a member of the WGA in 1900, when he wrote the play La Ronde, and he’d had the benefit of the format rights guild members receive today, he and his descendants would be very rich indeed.  Schnitzler’s concept, a series of sequences in which, initially, Person A meets […]

  If you go to too many Sundances, or see too many indie films, there are certain templates you come to recognize all too quickly.  THE LIFEGUARD, written and directed by Liz W. Garcia, a TV writer (Memphis Beat, Cold Case) making her directing debut, follows so many of these conventions that it could have […]

  PASSING:  The actress Rebecca Hall has taken a big swing in her writing/directing debut.  Her film Passing, based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, embraces ambitious, difficult themes with sensitivity and expertise.  The story concerns Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), one-time teen friends who run into each other after several years […]

> 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 […]

  PRESENCE (Neon – TBD):  Steven Soderbergh has always appreciated, and often demanded, a challenge, and in Presence he and screenwriter David Koepp have taken an original approach to the haunted house genre.  The point of view character here is the ghost itself, who we’re told has an inchoate consciousness that can’t distinguish between past […]

> Los Angelenos will have a chance to get advance looks at some of this year’s Oscar candidates at the AFI Film Festival, which begins in just about 2 weeks.  Today the Festival announced the Gala and Special Screenings, which typically make up the bulk of the high-profile titles, and they include quite a few […]