Sundance’s big feature award winner in 2012 is a post-Katrina-apocolypse-meets-Beyond-Thunderdome-meets-Newt & Ripley & pre-historic-beasts-as-aliens in the swamps of the Bayou-south.

Did you get all that?

Said another way…gritty-magical-apocolype-realism that is totally unique and unforgettable. Filmmaker, Benh Zeitlin, has succeeded in creating a film that even the most hardened film-buffs will be asking, “how does someone even THINK of a story like that” and - even more so - “How did they SHOOT that?” (The reported sale price to Fox Searchlight for $2 million seems like it wouldn’t even cover the costs to produce the film!)

And…write this down…Quvenzhane Wallis, as the child-hero, “Hushpuppy” - is an early Oscar favorite next year…Her performance is off-the-charts can’t miss.

Stop the presses - we have a winner!

It’s hard to have a fresh, original take on the “awkward fumbling-into-adulthood of 20-something’s in L.A.” genre, but “Save the Date” nails it with a story & performances that are as surprising and pitch-perfect as “Juno” - and that’s high praise.

Can’t remember the last time I was in a theater when there was - literally - such a buzz of positive feedback, and the under-the-radar cast won’t be out of the spotlight for long. Lizzie Caplan is a star and filmmaker Michael Mohan is worth rooting for.

What a wonderful, warm surprise on a ten-degree night in Park City, UT!

Add the term, “recreational cruelty” to your vocabulary, and if you’re confused about what that might mean, wait for this polarizing indie film to hit your local cineplex.

This hard-to-stomach, but sometimes funny film, is a raw look at the trust fund babies from the Beavis & Butthead generation. Talk about a niche! And boy…are these guys best in small doses.

While most bankruptcy stories are about money and flow from the lower / middle class with the occasional high flying Wall Street collapse, this film looks at an altogether more brutal moral bankruptcy of human nature at its lowest, most mean, numb, and devoid of compassion for…anything!

Tip your hat…it will make you uncomfortable…but you’ve never seen anything like it.

Pitch-perfect Woody Allen - more nostalgia & romance than humor, but a delightful 90 minutes. Plenty of love letters have been written about all things Paris - particularly Paris in the 20’s - but Woody Allen has the courage and the chops to one-up all of them. Owen Wilson perfectly cast, and the historical characters come to life - from Hemingway to F. Scott and Zelda - are just as you’d like to imagine them. Great performances all around and a brave message at the core: yearning for the “golden days gone by” is a human nature flaw that is doomed to repeat itself from generation to generation.

Swing and a miss! This movie tells the wrong story! In fact, Michael Lewis wrote the book too soon as history has shown Moneyball focuses on the SECOND most interesting success story of the “stats will set you free!” baseball era.

On the surface, this is baseball for stat-geeks with Brad Pitt maxing out his “aww shucks I may be wrong but I’m gonna do it my way” charm and Jonah Hill continuing to build a career as a scene stealer.

Michael Lewis - the book’s author - was right when he said he didn’t think the story would make a good movie. And - at its core - this movie is a tragedy! Hear me out…

The stats-will-set-you-free theory that the story is rooted in comes from Bill James. Pitt and Hill’s characters are the first to follow the gospel of Bill James to the letter, and - to their credit, they amass a 20 game winning streak with a bunch of no-names, but ultimately…lose in the first round of the playoffs.

(spoiler alert!) In the final act, Billy Beane, Pitt’s character, then gets courted by the RED SOX - who have HIRED Bill James himself - in an attempt to bring Boston their first World Series in 100 years…and Beane turns them DOWN. Let me say that again: HE TURNS DOWN THE CHANCE TO WORK WITH THE MAN WHO WROTE THE GOSPEL and to take on the biggest challenge in baseball (at the time) which was to “reverse the curse” and bring a championship to Boston! HEROES scale that mountain!

Instead, the A’s go on to return to mediocrity under Beane, and the Red Sox win not one, but TWO World Series with Bill James…and the history now shows that Beane and his bean counter couldn’t leverage the Bill James advantages as much as Bill James himself!

No need to mention the forced-shoe-horn sub-plots of father / daughter, husband / ex, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman in thankless role as “bad guy” manager of the A’s. The “data” shows that this movie is a swing and a miss and all the marketing to the contrary won’t change the fact that the REAL story of baseball-data-junkies as the new titans of industry has yet to be told…and it happened in Boston!

Mike Leigh makes interesting movies, with fully fleshed out characters, and some of them (“Happy Go Lucky”) can really surprise and delight, but this one…not so much. It’s pretty dark with the only light coming from the tired hopefulness of the every-men and every-women that fill out the story. Special kudos to Leslie Manville for playing one of the most desperate and sad characters I’ve seen on film in some time. She’s a train wreck, but you cannot look away.

Never has word-of-mouth about a movie been more spot on. This is a little too much of a Frankenstein monster of Spielberg’s greatest hits, but the performances of the kids in this cast are pitch-perfect and upstage everything else. Special nod to the best train crash sequence since The Fugitive!

This is straight Hallmark movie-of-the-week stuff, folks, perfume’d up to be “art film / critics darling / blockbuster”…whatever works, just pay at the cash-register. And have you bought the best-selling novel, yet? How about the action figures?…err…Crisco cook book? It all seems so vanilla - and at 2 and a half hours - how much vanilla can one digest before they need…well…HELP! There are some fine performances, no doubt, but they pale in comparison to other similar-themed flicks like “Driving Miss Daisy” - “Steel Magnolias” - “The Color Purple” - and can I get a “Fried Green Tomatos” to cut thru the after-taste? Did I mention that poop-pie is a critical plot device? Open wide, sista…

Miranda July is a completely original artist, film-maker, and performer. Her films are as unique as her translucent blue eyes, and definitely an acquired taste…like tofu. Talking cats (yes, really) and a comforting-lecturing-moon (oddly, it works!) meet raw private moments from top-notch actors in The Future. Fell asleep - twice! - watching this film…but rooting for the film-maker…there’s nothing else like her!

James L. Brooks has made some of the best, smartest, adult, drama-comedies in the last 30 years. His “Big 3”: “Terms of Endearment,” “Broadcast News,” and “As Good As It Gets” = yes, please!

“How Do You Know” is…horrible.

It’s hard to imagine how such a talented film-maker, and a world class cast, could make such a dud. And no one escapes the carnage. From a grossly mis-cast, Reese Witherspoon, to a phoning-it-in minor role from Jack Nicholson, this film also shows the limits of two of America’s “leading men” - Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson. As a viewer, you’ll find yourself straining to find elements that resemble Brooks’ award-winning films, and even imagining the shared embarrassment that all these talented artists had to feel when the credits rolled at the red-carpet screening. Facing “the press” and “selling” this film was the most impressive performance by anyone involved in “How Do You Know.”…Save yourself 121 minutes of your life and choose to watch one of the Big 3 from Brooks for a guaranteed enjoyable movie-watching experience.