> Watch It At Home:  Petty larceny. Sometimes casting can be too good:  Keanu Reeves playing a guy who pretty much sleepwalks through his own life is practically redundant.  His whole style, from the very start of his career in the Bill and Ted pictures (more than 20 years ago!), has been to lag a […]

  MAGAZINE DREAMS:  The hype was accurate:  Jonathan Majors gives a titanic performance in Elijah Bynum’s Magazine Dreams.  Playing Killian, a roided-up amateur bodybuilder obsessed with achieving glory in that profession, Majors somehow manages to be both massive and delicate, prone to rage but also abjectly needy for acceptance or connection.  Majors never misjudges the […]

    The Toronto Film Festival is on its way, and SHOWBUZZDAILY will be there.  The Festival, which runs Sept 6-16, today announced the bulk of its highest-profile titles, those that will screen in the Gala and Special Presentation categories.  Here, at a first glance, are some of the most promising: GALAS ARGO:  Against the […]

    RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Worth A Ticket:  Simian Power   Although it’s positioned as the last big adventure epic of the summer, for most of its length Rupert Wyatt’s RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES isn’t really an action movie.  Somewhat surprisingly, while it establishes an alternative mythology […]

  TURBO:  Watch It At Home – Nothing Supercharged About the Script If the new DreamWorks Animation release TURBO proves anything, it’s that even for the competition, there’s a special mystique about the films of Pixar.  (Until recently, anyway.)  Turbo painstakingly combines Ratatouille with the original Cars like the killer on The Bridge attaching American […]

> Worth a Ticket:  Diesel and The Rock keep their pedals to the metal. If you want to feel truly American, try reflecting on the new FAST FIVE while wall-to-wall coverage of the British royal wedding is airing on the television before you.  Every culture gets the pop entertainment it craves, and the dumb, disreputable […]

  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 […]

  SARAH’S KEY – Watch It At Home:  Misses a Difficult Mark     There may be no cinematic minefield more dangerous for filmmakers than the Holocaust.  For films entering that difficult territory, the choices of tone, approach and imagery may not just be called into question, but outright offend audiences, and viewers have very […]