9 years ago
All posts by Sean Burns
“That’s Italian!”: On the 25th Anniversary of “GoodFellas”
I was fifteen years old on September 21st, 1990 – the day Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas opened in theatres -- and a full two carloads of us had negotiated the necessary curfew extensions to go see a 10:30 PM show at the Showcase multiplex in Revere, a suburb ju...
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“Black Mass” Is An Ugly, Droning Nothing Of A Movie
What an ugly, droning nothing of a movie director Scott Cooper’s Black Mass turns out to be. This much-ballyhooed (at least here in Boston) take on the frankly exhausted Whitey Bulger mythos has nothing new nor particularly interesting to say, cycling through ...
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“90 Minutes In Heaven” Is 121 Minutes Of Boredom
For starters, the film is 121 minutes long so I feel a bit snookered by false advertising.
Smarmy, I know. But what else is there really to say about 90 Minutes in Heaven? Based on the book by Don Piper, which I'm told has sold over 6 million copies, it is a ...
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“Before We Go” Is A Charming Film With A Big Heart
A few months ago, while Ultron’s short-lived Age was dominating the box office, Chris Evans also appeared in a little-seen romantic comedy called Playing It Cool. Scripted by Chris Shafer and Paul Vickair, the smart-alecky exercise spent so much time trying to...
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“No Escape” Is Crude, Xenophobic Trash
There’s a legitimately hair-raising sequence early in No Escape that left me traumatized. Owen Wilson and his wife Lake Bell have traveled with their two daughters to a conspicuously unnamed country in Southeast Asia where he’s supposed to start a new job at a...
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“Zipper” Is Unsexy, Unfunny, And Unsurprising
Of interest perhaps only as a glossy piece of Eliot Spitzer fan-fiction, the hand-wringing drama Zipper stars blandly handsome Patrick Wilson as a Dudley Do-Right U.S. Attorney whose perfectly manicured career and family life begin to come undone when he quite...
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“Call Me Lucky” Is A Deeply Affecting Tribute To A Comic’s Comic
A hulking bear of a man with a handlebar moustache takes the stage, puffing on a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of beer, announcing: “So I’ve been on kind of a health kick lately.” The man is Barry Crimmins, the “comedian’s comic” who helped launch Bosto...
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“Fort Tilden” Is As Dyspeptic And Amusing As Its Leads Are Dim
A dyspeptic riff on the exhaustingly over-documented travails of today’s rudderless post-collegiate folks belatedly coming of age in gentrified Brooklyn, the debut feature from writer-directors Sarah Violet-Bliss and Charles Rogers takes an amusingly dim view ...
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“Cop Car” Starts Strong, But Sputters To A Finish
The first half-hour or so of director Jon Watts' Cop Car is such a model of lean, efficient storytelling that I initially thought I might be watching a new classic. Two 10-year old boys ( James Freedson-Jackson and Hays Wellford) have run away from home and ar...
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“Listen to Me Marlon” Is A Worthy Tribute to Brando
You could thumb through a thesaurus all day and still not find sufficient hyperbole to describe Marlon Brando's impact on the craft of acting. A prize pupil of Stella Adler, who brought the Stanislavsky Method to America, Brando blew it all up. Overnight, the ...
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