The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

There’s a good movie somewhere in Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but he hasn’t quite delivered it.  Based on James Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker short story and subsequent 1947 screen adaptation starring Danny Kaye, Stiller has taken a screenplay stuck in…

Read More

The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are at the top of their respective games with The Wolf of Wall Street, the crown jewel of American film in 2013.  At 71, Scorsese returns to glorious form with a wild ride of a movie, an unrepentant and…

Read More

American Hustle

A sensationally entertaining actors’ show—exactly what we expect from director David O. Russell—is the engine behind American Hustle, a smart piece of movie enjoyment so much fun to watch that it stands with Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street as a pair of…

Read More

Inside Llewyn Davis

The beating heart of an artist in a tailspin fuels the Coen Brothers lovely little period picture, Inside Llewyn Davis, a beautifully rendered portrait of a struggling folk guitarist, played in a star-making performance by Oscar Isaac, circa 1961 Greenwich Village. In a season…

Read More

Saving Mr. Banks

Emma Thompson gives a performance for the ages in Saving Mr. Banks, the new picture chronicling Walt Disney’s pursuit of humorless Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers, who in 1961 traveled from London to Hollywood to entertain signing away the film rights to her deeply…

Read More