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 […]
As a movie year, 2013 was awfully slow in getting started. Hardly anything worth remembering opened all winter and spring–only 1 movie in the Top 10 below opened in theatres before late May. Summer brought some relief, and then the film festival season that began at the end of August opened the doors wide […]
> Oren Moverman’s first film as a director, The Messenger, was a beautifully contained, emotionally detailed story about soldiers assigned to deliver tragic news to the families of the deceased. In his new film RAMPART, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Moverman is more ambitious and, unfortunately, a victim of the sophomore jinx. This […]
>SHOWBUZZDAILY will be at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, and today TIFF announced the first group of movies being screened (there are plenty more to come over the next few weeks). Here’s the full list, and some titles worthy of initial enthusiasm: GALAS ALBERT NOBBS: Oscar Bait Alert, with Glenn Close as a […]
Scott Cooper’s BLACK MASS is a beautifully put together and wonderfully acted true-life drama about Boston gangsters and the law, but it has a void at its center that holds it back from greatness. That center isn’t occupied by JoOut ofhnny Depp or his character James “Whitey” Bulger (one used that nickname with him […]
> The Sundance Film Festival, like Toronto, issues its announcements about the films that will be screening in several stages. (Sundance’s sadism about actually obtaining tickets, however, is all its own.) Today came the first release for the January 2012 Festival, covering the US and international competition slates in Dramatic and Documentary films. These are […]
WICKED LITTLE LETTERS (no distrib): In The Lost Daughter, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley played the same character at different ages, which prevented them from sharing the screen. That’s remedied in the fairly irresistible Wicked Little Letters, an English small-town comedy in the classic (if exceptionally foul-mouthed) mode. Inspired by a true incident, it tells the […]
THE PROGRAM feels entirely useless. With an authoritative documentary about the Lance Armstrong story already in wide distribution (Alex Gibney’s excellent The Armstrong Lie), the only reason to attempt a scripted version of the story would be to offer insights not present in the documentary material, or a cohesive narrative of his life that […]