What the Butler Saw

Joseph Pearlman offers a refreshing perspective on the acting profession. He focuses on the importance of enjoyment and enthusiasm. His teachings embrace fun in the pursuit of acting excellence. He wants actors to liberate themselves from fear and desperation, the better to foster an environment of creativity and authentic expression. His philosophy promotes practical steps that actors can take to eliminate desperation and self-doubt. He wants actors to focus on selfless, outcome-detached performances. This increases... Read more →

INTRODUCTION. Google something and you can feel omniscient, like a god. You can feel the same way with gnarly pharmaceuticals, with or without the imprimatur of a religious practice. Finally, mental maladies can make you think that God speaks to you and you alone and that you must enforce anything that He commands. Anonymous 616, written and directed by Mike Boss, reminds us how these delusions of omniscience actually go way, way back. The film... Read more →

INTRODUCTION. Directed by Ahmed Khan, “Baaghi 2” is a hot mess. This cinematic equal of a strobe light is just too much, too often for an otherwise so-so script. When Neha (Disha Patani) meets Ranveer Pratap Singh (Tiger Shroff), she notes his arrogant brashness. He’s loud, energetic, and passionate. This plays well when he’s in love (it makes him adorable). It also works when he helps her with a favor that becomes biblical in scale... Read more →

What’s wrong with a little Disney fantasy if it lets a 6-year-old girl for a moment escape her ironically named slum motel, The Magic Castle? That’s the question answered in the last minute of Sean Baker’s magical The Florida Project, a film included in Art Dubai’s year-round film programming in partnership with Front Row Filmed Entertainment and screened at Roxy Cinemas at Dubai's City Walk. It’s the story of Moonee (Brooklynn Kimberly Prince), 6 years... Read more →

Without the context its title provides, Eric Baudelaire’s latest film, Also Known as Jihadi, now showing at Art Basel, would be the cinematic equivalent of a butt-dial; the difference being you accidentally turn on the video camera, not dial the phone. We see passages of what appear to be random, unrehearsed scenes (a nice metaphor for life, by the way). We hear ambient noise - the sound of voices and motor vehicles, but nothing by... Read more →

Clocking in at a tick under 22 minutes, the humorously offbeat That’s Opportunity Knocking, written and directed by Charles Pelletier, asks, What could go wrong in a simple home robbery? The answer is, tons. Acknowledging that everyone, robbers, robbees, an otherwise innocent - and heavily sedated roommate - have various motivations and desires, not to mention personality quirks, the film is more an analysis of the context of a robbery and less of the particulars... Read more →

“The Patron Saint of Sideshow,” a documentary filmed and directed by Mike Brown for the Found Theatre, is an enchanting Puff the Magic Dragon tale. It recounts the making of “One Tit Wonder,” Cynthia Galles’ sublimation of her breast cancer diagnosis into a theatre production that recasts cellular mischief into an homage to humor, high spirits, and resilience. Every aspect of the Found Theatre is a labor of love. So too is Mike Brown’s direction.... Read more →

Devi (Salman Khan) is an adrenaline junkie. He lives for the kick of things. At first, the mayhem is reasonably innocent. He’s high-strung, never sitting still. He gets in fights. Mixed-martial arts kind of fights: he’s a great roundhouse kicker, as well. He argues - the outcome doesn’t matter - because he likes to pit himself against others. Because he’s charismatic, it’s almost an endearing trait. The problem is, he can’t stay in one job.... Read more →

Watching Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (Humpty Sharma’s Bride), a Bollywood romantic comedy written and directed by Shashank Khaitan, is like watching soccer. It’s got a huge playing field, the clock keeps ticking, and there’s always something going on. You don’t necessarily notice the director’s nuances, the actor’s characterizations, or the plot’s intricacies. But you do feel how everything blends together, melodic, rhythmic, and colorful. You get swept up in the enchantment of the spectacle’s bumpy... Read more →

Bilkis Ahmed aka Bobby (Vidya Balan) wants to be a detective. But there are obstacles. First, her training. She has none, a point her boss from the agency where she wanted to work pounds home. Second, her gender. She’s a woman. Her parents despair of her choice of profession and her lack of interest in marriage. When she makes stacks of money from a big case, her proud father won’t accept her gifts. Her contemporaries... Read more →

Lisa Adams: As It Appears To Be, a 54-minute documentary directed by Juri Koll, presents a portrait of an artist who forged an individual, burn-the-ships path. It shows why her work is unique. It shows why it has integrity. And it shows, if you take a long-term view of things, why it will resonate far beyond the era in which she made it. The film’s title comes from a longer quote: “Nothing is as it... Read more →

In matters of romance, we say that opposites attract. That’s not always the case with the parents. Such is the intrigue of “2 States,” written and directed by Abhishek Varman, based on the novel by Chetan Bhagat. It’s the love story between vivacious Ananya (Alia Bhatt) and Kris (Arjun Kapoor), her gloomy fellow business school student. She’s a Tamilian Brahmin from Chennia. He’s a North Indian Punjabi from Delhi. Different cultures? She doesn’t care, he... Read more →

NOTE: What’s below contains an unusually significant spoiler alert. Half, if not more, of the three hours of Vijay Krishna Acharya’s Dhoom 3, the third installment of the wildly-successful “Dhoom” franchise, is filled with spectacle, very well choreographed, adrenaline-pumping spectacle: motorcycle chases, song and dance numbers, and, because it’s a circus story, staged performances. That’s just as well because a couple of plot holes, one the size of the Grand Canyon, destroy the credibility but... Read more →

Feuding families, star-crossed lovers, and a tragic conclusion. Sound familiar? How about a young man and woman (with an unconsummated marriage) as reluctant CEOs of their respective crime families and a dead peacock (not a horse’s head) delivered as a warning? Does that sound familiar as well? Throw in some elaborate costumes and dance numbers and, oh yeah, English subtitles (it’s in Hindi) and you have the glamorous, electric, and tragic “Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela”... Read more →

Jack Smith (Noah Mills) seems to have it all. He’s handsome, like a print ad model from a high-end glossy magazine. He’s stylish, in that black and white, minimal way that screams money and good genes. He has means enough to engage in retail therapy at Dolce and Gabbana. And he’s got a lovely girlfriend, Amber Leahy (Roxy Olin). Chomping down prescription drugs (Adderall, Ritalin, Vicodin, and Viagra) like what used to be called nickel... Read more →

Whether they deal with an entire country (Cuba: A Lifetime of Passion) or else a sliver of land a stone’s throw from Times Square, Glenn Gebhard’s productions capture not just the history, the struggles (natural and man-made), and the beauty of the places they document but also their pulse, their color, and their humanity. They make the experience of each place feel local at the same time they make them feel universal. Groundbreaking and fascinating,... Read more →

Fascinating, exquisitely shot, and not a little funny, “Cuba: A Lifetime of Passion,” directed by Glenn Gebhard, written by Juan Santamarina, and narrated by Michael York, updates the status of a tired and spent Cuban Revolution and the people who support, oppose, and deal with it as best they can. We witness the Revolution’s liabilities (poverty, low standard of life, rigged elections, restricted press) as well as its benefits (free medical care, state-sponsored sports and... Read more →

Accountant Chris Moneymaker (real name, that; and apt) was on the verge of losing everything because he liked to gamble on sporting events. He started young and, even as he got older, with a pregnant wife and a mortgage he couldn’t pay, he continued to spend (and lose) money he didn’t have. He lost jobs, had to hide from bookies, and was estranged for a while from his father. Then something happened. Wanting to make... Read more →

War may be hell but, as laid out in “The Cost of a Soul,” written and directed by Sean Kirkpatrick, the homefront isn’t so cool, either. Structured as an out of the frying pan and into the fire Grand Guignol, it tells the tale of two men from Philadelphia linked anonymously by a common mission in Iraq but who meet in an explosive, brutal series of tit-for-tat, inter-neighborhood reprisals. Studded with raw and powerful performances... Read more →

On the potential-for-blockbuster scale of superhero films, “Iron Man 2,” directed by Jon Favreau, written by Justin Theroux, Stan Lee, Don Heck, Larry Kieber, and Jack Kirby, registers monumental. Too bad its execution undercuts such status with Hollywood doses of too-much-ism. Prior hype aside, themes abound, a story line bristles: it’s got promise. There’s ego (Tony Stark’s) as well as healthy doses of capitalism (the Iron Man suit leaves beta version one and gets reverse... Read more →

“Date Night,” directed by Shawn Levy, written by Josh Klausner, reminds us of the comedy adage, if you hit a guy in the face with a pie, it’s funny. If he’s wearing a tuxedo, it’s hilarious. For most of the film, night-on-the-town husband and wife, Phil (Steve Carell) and Claire Foster (Tina Fey) look elegant, respectively, in their smart suit and little black dress. Their attire sets up the many humorous scenes, most of which... Read more →

In the science fiction dystopia of “Repo Men,” directed by Miguel Sapochnik, written by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, Sapochnik engages us in the life of an ordinary man whose heart, literally, isn’t in his work. The production is more than admirable, it’s entertaining, prophetic, and, implication-wise, chilling as hell. Set in a future that looks more likely than un-, where synthetic internal organs are as available as they are expensive, the movie imagines a... Read more →

The last time we saw Chloe Moretz was in “(500) Days of Summer” where she dispensed preternatural wisdom to her lovesick schlep of an older brother, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. In “Kick-Ass,” directed by Matthew Vaughn, written by Vaughn and Jane Goldman, based on the comic book by Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., she appears as superhero Mindy Macready aka Hit-Girl, again more mature than her age should allow but here she’s too precocious. The movie... Read more →

The uncommonly spectactular “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo,” directed by Niels Arden Oplev, written by Nikolai Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, based on a novel by Stieg Larsson, begins as the story of an investigative reporter who’s set up for libel and gets sentenced to prison. Then it becomes a whodunit when, in the six months before he has to go to prison, he agrees to solve a presumed murder. Finally, and seamlessly, it ends as... Read more →

“The Runaways,” directed and written by Floria Sigismondi, based on Cherie Currie’s memoir, “Neon Angel: A Memoir of a Runaway,” aims to show the raucous origins of what’s been called rock and roll’s first all-girl band. It does, by taking us back to that 1975 day when record producer Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon) introduced an existentially orphaned Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart), who played the guitar, to the bored, emotionally stifled Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), who... Read more →

If it had stuck to its premise – a troubled young man connives to date and dump the daughter of a NYC cop who beat the crap out of him - “Remember Me,” directed by Allen Coulter, directed by Will Fetters, would have enough twists and turns to engage us, feel for the characters, witness how true love can spring up phoenix-like in the most unlikely and moral reprehensible of encounters. We could have seen... Read more →

“She’s Out Of My League,” directed by Jim Field Smith, written by Sean Anders and John Morris, feels like a food fight between the cheerleaders and the nerds in a high school cafeteria. It’s weak premise serves up cliché heaped upon cliché dragged mercilessly on. Why wouldn’t that hockey puck hit the guy in the nuts? Why wouldn’t the hapless dork prematurely ejaculate before he barely got to first base? Why wouldn’t the never-left-homers have... Read more →

Ham-fisted stonewalling aka political expediency plagues a soldier in “The Green Zone,” directed by Paul Greengrass, written by Brian Helgeland, who wonders why his WMD disposal unit receives useless intelligence. Providing a plausible explanation for why we entered our current war, the movie is a pisser, a downer, a hair-puller; what little faith you might have in our political leadership dive bombs to less than zero. Employing an escalating cat and mouse technique to reveal... Read more →

Thanks to Roman Polanski’s “Ghost Writer,” written by Polanski and Robert Harris, we have a stunningly enacted, perfectly sensible if ultimately improvable explanation for Gulf War Two. Imagine, theoretically, if England’s lockstep with America in Bush’s War was orchestrated by the special relationship of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s pants-in-the-family wife Cherie’s with a CIA operative that fronted as a Harvard Law School professor. That’s the premise of this understated, well-acted thriller, adaptation of Harris’s novel,... Read more →

Only Tim Burton could turn Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” into an action hero movie and still make it the visual equivalent of Carrol’s double dutch poem, “Jabberwocky.” Written by Linda Woolverton, the story combines bits of the story, bits of the poem, with the aim to give Alice gravitas that creates a narrative to frame her dreamscape odyssey down under. Though early on the production beamishly galumphs, gyres and gimbels through the wabe, the... Read more →

But for a total collapse at the end, “Shutter Island,” directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Laeta Kalogridis and Dennis Lehane, would have been a great film. Using magnificent visuals and a slow, dramatic build-up, Scorsese successfully evokes both the 1954 atmosphere of an island asylum for the criminally insane and, in flashback-snippets, the 1945 liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Leonardo DiCaprio turns in a memorable performance as Teddy Daniels, a U.S. Marshall allegedly... Read more →

In “The Wolfman”. written by Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, director Joe Johnston tries to create a Victorian English thriller about the beast that appears when the moon is full. Though there are the to-be-expected scenes of gore (strands of intestines, a couple of beheadings, scads of blood) which are meant to strike terror into the audience and though there is one good performance (Emily Blunt as Gwen Conliffe), the widow of the Wolfman’s... Read more →

“Dear John”, directed by Lasse Hallstrom, written by Jamie Linden and Nicholas Sparks, tells a love story between Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried), a college student, and John Tyree (Channing Tatum), a Green Beret on leave from duty in the Middle East. She’s attractive, popular, and comes from a wealthy family. He’s a ruggedly handsome outsider raised by his father Mr. Tyree (Richard Jenkins). They meet after he jumps off a pier to retrieve her purse... Read more →

Scenes of other worlds that resemble Renaissance painting depictions of heaven and hell; gods that want to throw these worlds into conflict; an academy to train and nurture otherwise ostracized demigods and other not-like-us teenagers – no, it’s not part of the Harry Potter franchise but “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief”, directed by Chris Columbus, written by Craig Titley and Rick Riordan, a film whose cinematic flourishes and well-pitched story surprisingly lack... Read more →

Director Garry Marshall seems to have thought that he should package “Valentine’s Day”, written by Katherine Fugate. Abby Kohn, and Marc Silverstein, as a Whitman’s Sampler with 15 A-List actors and riffs off of “American Graffiti”, “Love, Actually”, and “New York, I Love You”. Nice try. First of all, these vaunted, or at least much-heralded actors, aren’t given much room to maneuver; it’s also possible they implausibly raised our expectations of what the production would... Read more →

Pierre Morel stages “From Paris With Love”, written by Adi Hasak and Luc Besson, with the usual attention-grabbing elements - car chases, gun fights, explosions, a terrorist plot, betrayal – but doesn’t weave a story that holds your interest. The idea’s there, two night and day characters, Charlie Wax (John Travolta) and James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who join forces in Paris to rout an Asian drug cell that raises arms money for Middle East... Read more →

Though this confectionary production offers exhilarating visuals both human and man-made, “When In Rome,” directed by Mark Steven Johnson, written by David Diamond and David Weissman, falls deflatingly flat as a comedy, a love story, and a source of any insight into things romantic. Set in Rome and New York, it’s a dang-gorgeous story that tries with zero success to straddle the line between true love and otherwise untrue infatuation. Johnson manages to capture giddiness... Read more →

Though the look and feel screams stylized 19th century poshness and elegance, there’s something all-too-contemporary about “The Young Victoria,” directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, written by Julian Fellowes, a historical drama that recounts how Victoria (Emily Blunt) ascended amidst great uncertainty to the British throne, married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg (Rupert Friend), and thus began a reign of 60 years that heralded the sun rising over the British Empire. The film utilizes to great effect the... Read more →

“Crazy Heart,” directed and written by Scott Cooper, features a larger than life character with a Mount Rushmore face and a constitution that’s about to crumble. Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is a performer/composer whose songs provide safe, vicarious pleasure for fans of his music, but whose inspiration (his life) slowly breaks him down. Though his life’s a mess as he travels from town to town, taking cheap and temporary comfort where he can find it,... Read more →

Once in a while you come upon a movie whose look, tone, and feel, along with whose script, acting, and direction make you want to simply exhort, “Just go see this” (I’m serious. You can stop reading this right now). “A Single Man,” directed by Tom Ford, written by David Scearce, based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, is one such movie. Ford’s gorgeously measured story recounts the events in a day after said single... Read more →

Director Scott Stewart’s attempt to recast the birth of a Christ-like savior amidst an onslaught of pissed off, God-sent avenging angels recalls recent similar movies that, under various guises, recount apocalypses and Chosen Ones. Though there are moments of genuine awe – some computer-enhanced, some fight-choreographed – the film is striking without being resonant. There’s the good: Stewart and Peter Schink’s screenplay offers an intriguing premise that warms us about the consequences of our foibles... Read more →

As the well-wrought, powerfully acted, post apocalypse drama “The Book of Eli”, directed by Albert Hughes, written by Gary Whitta, plays itself out, a couple of nagging questions bother me: Why did it take Eli (Denzel Washington) thirty years to walk from anywhere in the United States to San Francisco? How did he manage to survive a point blank gut shot and then survive to do something that I can’t reveal here without demolishing the... Read more →

Anand Tucker’s romantic comedy “Leap Year,” written by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfront, offers an endearing look at the way a hard-nosed, anxious-to-marry woman takes matters into her own hands and follows her heart on a romantic whim and ends up disillusioned, chastened and, ultimately redeemed. Though it’s obvious early on that her odyssey will cause her to change her final destination, plenty of aw-shucks scenes, some very funny, hold our interest. Tucker and two... Read more →

Besides its magnificent story of a mostly-vampire world that’s running out of human blood, “Daybreakers,” a vampire sci-fi film directed and written by Michael and Peter Spierig, is also a topical drama about racism, corporate malfeasance, the economics and politics that surround a dwindling commodity, and a reminder about the omnipresence of good old human greed. It’s a relief to watch a vampire-riddled film that doesn’t dissect the teen angst of the cinegenic undead and... Read more →

Directed by Miguel Arteta, written by Gustin Nash and C.D. Payne, “Youth In Revolt” is a flat story of a dweeb, Nick Twisp (Michael Cera) who concocts an altar ego, Francois Dillinger, to court and try to win a girl is flat, tinny and not in the least funny. The premise is there; chances are we all harbor an inner dashing dude, oozing with derring-do or whatever we misguidingly think a woman might fall for.... Read more →

The inside job heist of $42 million from an armored truck doesn’t offer much as the premise of a movie. And even though the film offers a few credible performances, the story and characters director Nimrod Antal presents in “Armored”, written by James V. Simpson, doesn’t do much to change our expectations. Antal presents a predictable cross section of security guards you’d see in similarly set up films. They’re hard men, physically imposing, not a... Read more →

With its gentle humor and well drawn characters, “The Blind Side,” directed by John Lee Hancock, written by Hancock, based on the book by Michael Lewis, offers a rah-rah story of an unlikely, even miraculous Cinderella rise from bleakness to fulfillment. Though the story doesn’t end where it logically should have ended and perhaps it would have been better if we were let in on the fact that it was based on true events, it... Read more →

Once in a while you should see a movie for reasons other than the way a director has ambitiously attempted to remake a classic. This dazzling re-staging of Federico Fellini’s autobiographical “8-1/2”, directed by Rob Marshall, written by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella, has lots of potential but its context makes it an oddity, the cinematic equivalent of a knock-off Gucci bag with the style, the swagger, the oomph but whose seams, on closer inspection,... Read more →

Nothing, so I’ve read, mollifies divorce like the prospect of sex-with-the-ex and the hope trumping experience prospect of reconciliation. But then, of course, it’s complicated. Directed and written by Nancy Meyers, “It’s Complicated” is a charming tale of a ten-year divorced couple, Jane (Meryl Streep) and Jake (Alec Baldwin), who try without much success but with great humor to re-kindle the flame that sustained a nineteen year marriage that produced three tooth-grindingly-attractive children, Luke (Hunter... Read more →

Adult-wise, “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel,” directed by Betty Thomas, written by Jon Vitti, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger, offers an unoriginal setup for a movie. Take the Chipmunk franchise, trend-follow it with a movie prequel (or, ugh, a squeakquel), add a trio of female chipmunk-tweens, throw in some admittedly cute (it sounds better in French: mignonne) dance numbers, some clichéd predicaments, some tweenybopper romance (man and beast, though not with each other), and... Read more →