HITCHCOCK: Worth A Ticket (Opens November 23) – A Moderately Good Eve-ening The American Film Institute’s yearly festival opened tonight with the world premiere of the fittingly movie-centric HITCHCOCK. In choosing the film, AFI celebrated another occasional Hollywood tradition: the tendency to make two unrelated films on the same subject in a brief period […]
> Worth a Ticket: A funny, moving story about navigating the twists of life. Mike Mills’ BEGINNERS is about the fumble for love, the wrong turns and mistakes that can delay–although luckily not always prevent–true happiness. Mills has said that this story is semiautobiographical: like his protagonist Oliver (Ewan McGregor), Mills learned after the […]
EDGE OF TOMORROW: Watch It At Home – Needed To Hit Reset One More Time There’s a lot of inventiveness in EDGE OF TOMORROW, which combines the premise of Groundhog Day with a War of the Worlds-like plot–certainly more than the usual for a mega-budgeted Hollywood summer action movie. That keeps it compelling for […]
> Not Even For Free It was a feel-good story last weekend when the expensive shambles called Sucker Punch went down, defeated by the relatively low-budget family comedy DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: RODRICK RULES. (Mitch Metcalf’s weekend boxoffice roundup is here.) The story would have been better, though, if Wimpy 2 were any good. […]
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET: Buy A Ticket – Scorsese’s Boisterous Epic of Bottomless Greed The key sequence in Martin Scorsese’s THE WOLF OF WALL STREET arrives about 2 hours into its 3-hour length. (No meaningful spoilers here.) The resoundingly crooked financier Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his equally bent sidekick Donnie Azoff (Jonah […]
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release): The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage. A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened. That makes The Eyes of […]
ANOTHER EARTH – Worth A Ticket: Tiny Story With Big Ambitions For ANOTHER EARTH, the Sundance Film Festival went exactly the way it’s supposed to. The low-key picture was made on a miniscule budget (a few hundred thousand dollars) by complete unknowns, director/cinematographer/editor/co-writer/co-producer Mike Cahill and star/co-writer/co-producer Brit Marling, with far less […]
> When the inevitable US remake of the French thriller SLEEPLESS NIGHT arrives, it’ll benefit from some sharper dialogue (assuming the subtitles in Toronto were fully translating the original), a bit more characterization and a slightly more varied tone. But the framework already exists for a solid action hit. The picture begins as a variant […]