Chris Pine as Robo-Ryan — Jacksnapper injected with video-game DNA. Seemingly related to Captain Kirk. Kenneth Branagh provides the robo-direction. David Koepp wrote the robo-screenplay. My, how sensibilities have changed since Clear and Present Danger came out in ’94 (i.e., the Pleistocene era). Not Patriot Games, not so much Hunt for Red October, not The Sum of All Fears. [Note: Despite two restarts on two computers the sound isn’t working. On anything. I’m presuming this is my problem alone.]

“All Is Lost is amazing, deeply moving, and a harking back to an age when the best mainstream films might be the best pictures America made,” says New Republic critic David Thomson in a 10.3 posting. “It is an adventure and an epic with one person. I am warning you that it may win Best Picture, and that its one person, Robert Redford, deserves what has never come to him before, an Oscar for best actor. He is as noble, vulnerable, and harrowed as Gary Cooper at his best.

My first thought when I saw the new Philomena poster was “where have I seen this before?” I’m sure there are dozens of other posters that put out a similar look and attitude. It says “this is a very safe and tidy film about safe and tidy people…trust us, it will not threaten or challenge you in the least.” It’s also gives Judy Dench a nice little nip and tuck — she looks about 40 or 45 here.

Documentarian Bob Smeaton has done well by himself and his subject, the late Jimi Hendrix, in Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A’Comin’ (PBS, 11.5). He’s delivered a stirring, well-crafted valentine — a two-hour portrait of a much-worshipped, gentle-mannered, extremely modest genius who loved the ladies and was obsessively devoted to playing guitar. Which is all true as far as it goes. But this is a project controlled by the Hendrix family (i.e., Experience Hendrix, LLC), and if you know anything about this notoriously conservative-minded bunch you know what that means. Almost all the details about Jimi Hendrix’s short life that allude to any kind of subterranean undertow or inclination (such as the ingestion of psychedelic drugs) have been pretty much scrubbed out.

Universal’s decision to remove Focus Features CEO James Schamus and install FilmDistrict exec Peter Schlessel in his place means that Focus will no longer be involved with refined, upscale movies for people who eat granola and olives and feta cheese with pita bread. The new idea is to make movies for people who slurp 24-ounce containers of Coca Cola while inhaling tubs of buttered popcorn and extra-large packets of red Twizzlers. Schlessel, who helped make Screen Gems into a valued low-rent moneymaker for Sony, was exec producer on Oldboy, Insidious: Chapter 2, Olympus Has Fallen, Evil Dead, Looper, The Possession and Drive. Say goodbye to the Focus of yore (i.e., Burn After Reading, Brokeback Mountain, Atonement, Moonrise Kingdom, Lost in Translation) — those days are finito. This is now, the world we live in.

Radius, the Weinstein Co. and Landmark Theatres have announced that all federal and military employees will be given free tickets to see Jacob Kornbluth and Robert Reich‘s Inequality For All (i.e, the Inconvenient Truth of American economics) but only today. They should be a little more liberal about it and allow the eligible to see it gratis for two days — today (Thursday, 10.3) and tomorrow (Friday, 10.4). And then go back to paid admissions starting Saturday. Participating Landmark Theatres include The Landmark (Los Angeles, CA), California 3 (Berkeley, CA), Harvard Exit 2 (Seattle, WA), E Street Cinema (Washington, DC), Century Centre 7 (Chicago, IL), Aquarius 2 (Palo Alto, CA), Ritz 5 (Philadelphia, PA), Bethesda Row (Bethesda, MD), Kendall Square 9 (Cambridge, MA), Hillcrest 5 (San Diego, CA), Renaissance Place 5 (Highland Park, IL), La Jolla Village 4 (La Jolla, CA) and Keystone Art (Indianapolis, IN).

Last night I blew off an invite to the LA Live premiere of Robert Rodriguez‘s Machete Kills in order to catch a Beverly Hills screening of the PBS doc Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin’…sorry. Who am I kidding, “sorry”? I can’t stand Rodriguez. Then I read Alfonso Duralde’s Wrap review and knew I’d made the right call. “Machete Kills opens with a fake trailer for a not-yet-produced third installment, then spends the next 100-plus minutes making a case for plunging a knife into the franchise’s heart,” his review begins.

I was about to do another shutdown riff via this new Jon Stewart clip, but it’s more important to mention something about TheWrap that’s been irking me for some time. The relentless pop-ups and automatic page refreshings are becoming more and more infuriating. Now with IOS 7 it seems even worse. Yesterday when I tried to read a Wrap story on my iPhone the page auto-refreshed itself a couple of times and then froze on some ad or whatever, hiding the content of the page under a dark gray shadow. The fuck? I tried eliminating the ad thing and failed. They need to jigger things so you can surf the site without all this ad crap. I haven’t time for this shite.

My heart surged when I noticed that the title of this 12 Years A Slave teaser is “Fight Back.” I presumed that meant it would show that slammin’ scene in which Chiwetel Ejiofor, as kidnapped free-man-turned-slave Solomon Northrup, stands up to Paul Dano‘s sadistic John Tibeats character and then pounds the shit out of him. This scene isn’t just cathartic — it’s ten times more satisfying than all of the bullshit payback scenes in Django Unchained rolled into one. But the teaser doesn’t show it. It’s just a standard montage teaser with a two-second clip of the beatdown scene (from 24 to 26-second mark). Why call it “Fight Back” then? 12 Years A Slave opens on 10.18.