The Oscar battle of 2006 is a distant memory. The victors have already counted the spoils (I can still see Marty standing up there on that stage though, finally clutching the little gold man), leaving the losers to cart the bodies of Eddie Murphy and Dreamgirls off the field. With the battle lines not yet [...]

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I should’ve known better.  True, this wasn’t exactly a great weekend for new releases at the cineplex, but still I should’ve known better.  The thing is, I needed to kill 100 minutes or so while I waited for the Planet Terror segment of Grindhouse to unspool before catching the 2nd half featuring Tarantino’s superior Death Proof.  I’d [...]

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It’s a slow weekend in theaters.   
In wide release:

The Invisible:  High school sensitive guy Justin Chatwin is savagely attacked by a street gang for his participation in Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2.  Unfortunately he doesn’t die, but is left in some kind of crazy supernatural limbo and he must find his body before… before… well, before I don’t know what - [...]

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As the lead character in the new comedy Hot Fuzz, Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is what you might call a hard ass.  He’s a by-the-book, one man London police machine with a 400% higher arrest rate than any other officer in the city.  His reward for a job well done?  A promotion to sergeant - [...]

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In anticipation  of attending his 9th Annual Overlooked Film Festival beginning this Wednesday, Roger Ebert has chosen to answer a couple of questions that have been on the minds of movie lovers everywhere:  “Is he ok?” and “How does he look?”
It’s shocking at first to see the toll that cancer has taken on him as it spread from [...]

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I like to tell myself that if my father was an Oscar nominated writer and director with several hits and at least four films that can be considered cultural touchstones under his belt (2 written, 2 written/directed); and if this father executive produced a screenplay I wrote and got his Oscar nominated, long-time editor to do the cutting; and finally, if my father’s name [...]

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In 2005, director Jean-Claude Brisseau was charged with sexual harassment, assault and fraud by a French court after he was accused by two actresses of forcing them to masturbate for him over over a 5 year period in tests (some on camera, some not) for his 2002 film Secret Things,  a film for which they were ultimately not cast.    Brisseau maintained [...]

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I wasn’t going to go.  All day long I kept coming up with excuses.  It’s too far.   It’s a work night.  I don’t really want to see Shooter again.  I’d rather go see the Siodmak film at The Egyptian.  After a while though, I realized these were all the same reasons I hadn’t gone before and [...]

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This was brought to my attention via an item at Hollywood-Elsewhere and was confirmed this morning at Variety.com:  The 1112-seat Mann National in Westwood, one of the last large, single-screen theatres built in Los Angeles, will close tonight after the final 10:10pm showing of Shooter.
I’m told Westwood was once prime movie watching territory and there are [...]

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Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned bucket of popcorn and which bean-counting stooge first thought of replacing it with the paper bag anyway?  Yes I know, in the grand cosmic scheme of things it probably seems of little consequence, but is it really?  
 It turns out life is not just about the big events.  In between the marriages and funerals and [...]

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