Zach Braff’s WISH I WAS HERE, his first film as a writer-director since Garden State 10 years ago, mixes genuine, deeply-felt emotion with the kind of contrivances that would grate even on a second-rate sitcom.  (This week’s episode:  Dad tries to homeschool the kids!  And Uncle Jonah wears a costume to Comic-Con just to […]

  LITTLE DEATH (no distrib):  Jack Begert’s first feature (co-written with Dani Goffstein) is a diptych about Los Angeles, put together in sharply contrasting ways.  The first half is about sitcom writer Martin (David Schwimmer) as he hustles to get his first film as writer/director greenlit, while coping with his splintering marriage to Jessica (Jena […]

  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 […]

  892 (no distrib):  John Boyega’s turbo-charged performance fuels this true story.  In 2017, when Brian Brown-Easley (Boyega) entered a Wells Fargo branch in a suburb of Atlanta and informed the teller that his backpack contained a bomb, he wasn’t trying to hold up the bank.  Rather, it was his desperate attempt to get enough […]

  THEATER CAMP (Searchlight/Disney):  The odds are that a lot of people who’ll want to see a movie called Theater Camp are comfortable with the kind of ramshackle, hit-or-miss qualities associated with actual summer camp productions, and will likewise find plenty to enjoy in a movie that’s been made with more love and energy than […]

  MY OLD SCHOOL (no distrib):  Although the story is apparently well-known in the UK, here the twisty tale that Jono McLeod unfurls in his documentary would constitute a spoiler, so we’ll leave things vague here.  This much is fair:  in the early 1990s, a 16-year old student named Brandon Lee arrived at a Glasgow […]

> 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 […]

  OPHELIA (no distrib):  Claire McCarthy’s film, written by Semi Chellas from Lisa Klein’s novel, dampens the fun of its own concept.  The idea is to re-tell Hamlet through the eyes of Shakespeare’s ill-fated Ophelia (Daisy Ridley) in a somewhat feminist way, and unlike other Bard marginalia like Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead […]