George Clooney and the Coen Brothers: perfect together. Except this year, they're not. Clooney is here in two films and the Coens (both of them, working as a pair as usual) are also at Toronto, but their projects are not related. Also here is ...
It's not unusual for a festival to showcase period pieces providing semi-fictionalized accounts of famous people's lives. This year brings three such high-profile productions to Toronto. Those are Bright Star, Jane Campion's autopsy of the tragic ...
September 11. The ghosts of years and festivals past. Last year, due to the early coming of Labor Day, I was home before the anniversary - the first time that happened since 2001. This year, the festival is just getting underway. It's difficult ...
Summer is over. The kids are back in school. The nights are getting longer, the days shorter. Baseball is moving inexorably toward the playoffs; football season has begun. Heat is escaping from the northern hemisphere like air through the slow ...
The Varsity is once again showing mainstream fare. The Elgin and Roy Thompson Hall are quiet. The airport is buzzing as the lasts guests and festival-goers wait for their planes. The critics are dotting the final i's and crossing the final t's of ...
Before every showing in Toronto, an anti-piracy message is displayed for about 10 seconds. The language is fairly familiar - a reminder that viewers are about to see a copyrighted work and any unauthorized duplication will result in ejection from ...
I remember the first movie I viewed theatrically. It wasn't the first movie I had ever seen - not by a long shot. By the time my father took me to a theater, I was used to watching films (monster movies, mainly) on TV. My initial experience with a ...
When it comes to The Passion of the Christ's box office performance, I was right and I was wrong. I correctly predicted that it would capture at least $100 million in its first 5 days, but missed when I said that repeat business was unlikely (too ...
When I'm asked if I recommend either United 93 or World Trade Center, I begin my response as follows: "If you can handle a movie about 9/11..." The qualifier is not meant to be sarcastic or condescending. It is not intended as a put-down. There are...
There's a saying that states "Third time's a charm." In life, this may often be the case, but when it comes to movies and their sequels, third time's anything but a charm.May 2007 has seen the release of three part threes. Spider-Man 3 has already ...
If it's a Wednesday (my normal weekday blog entry day off), this ReelThoughts must have something to do with site processes or something of minimal general interest to movie-lovers. I don't like to "waste" my regular valuable columns for this less ...
I have been getting e-mails asking why I haven't written about certain topics and/or issues. So I thought I'd take this opportunity to discuss five things about which there will likely not be independent ReelThoughts entries. (The economy is not ...
I thought it was about time to write a new blog entry, given that it has been more than a month since my last one. The joys of fatherhood and keeping up with an increasingly less-inspired batch of new theatrical releases... At some point, I may even ...
An interesting e-mail showed up in my inbox the other day. It asked, in part: "Do you consider those who use ad blockers while reading your site to be stealing content?" On the surface, this may seem like a ridiculous suggestion, but I can assure ...
It's a sad week for movies. The only new release is One Missed Call. Not only is the film pretty bad, but it's generating almost no buzz. Will anyone other than the ten people who joined me this afternoon see it? I can't recommend it even to die-...
This is the last of the dead Fridays for theatrical releases. There are only two wide releases this week and one limited title expanding to everywhere. There are still a lot of movies out there from the pre-Christmas period that viewers have not ...
Call it the week of Cloverfield. Whatever else the movie may be (and it has sharply divided critics across-the-board), the is the first "must see" film of the year for males ages 11 through 40. If you're a member of that demographic and you don't ...