9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“The D Train”
Warning: There be spoilers within.
Reflecting upon the years since high school and re-evaluating life goals and missed opportunities is a tough exercise. Yet, in The D Train, the now-middle-aged Dan Landsman (Jack Black) seems to have done pretty well for him...
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“Hot Pursuit”
Hot Pursuit doesn’t aspire to much. It’s basically a throwaway lark that you can easily imagine producer-star Reese Witherspoon cooked up as a way to kick back and relax after exhausting herself with the performance of her career both in front of and behind th...
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“Reality”
If a viewer can expect anything from a Quentin Dupieux film titled Reality, it’s willful surrealism. Reality and reality pass each other like two ships in the night, and one of those ships is an impish gallimaufry stitched together from bits and pieces of Magn...
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“Maggie”
In a grim, vaguely future-ish American Midwest, crops are burned and cities are on lockdown under the threat of a zombie plague. Of course, the word “zombie” is never used, but the audience knows what’s up -- rotted victims shamble around moaning and biting pe...
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“5 Flights Up”
Modest in ambition and charm, 5 Flights Up, a deftly played two-hander starring Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton, feels a lot like a Hallmark Channel movie that just so happened to land a couple of cinema legends in leading roles. But movie-star charisma goes a...
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“Saint Laurent”
“We are bodies without souls,” the iconic couturier Yves Saint Laurent writes at one point in Bertrand Bonello’s new film, “because the soul is elsewhere.” Where most biopics spend so much energy cramming in narrative detail that their subject eludes them, Sai...
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“I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story”
On merit alone, I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story is a profoundly moving documentary. But if you grew up with "Sesame Street" in the 70s and 80s, you may find yourself experiencing an extra, particularly overwhelming set of emotions. Through an endless a...
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“Playing It Cool”
Pity the poor romantic comedy, a genre trashed by so much forgettable multiplex fodder that nobody even tries to make one anymore without air-quotes. Such is the dilemma of director Justin Reardon’s Playing It Cool, which assembles an enormously appealing cast...
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“What Now”
What Now, Ash Avildsen's debut as director, writer, and actor, explicitly invokes the name of Entourage only once. But every frame of this nigh-on unwatchable film is suffused with that ghastly program’s regressive gender politics, brutal absence of wit, under...
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“Far from the Madding Crowd”
“All the women who are independent,” declares Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan) early on in Far from the Madding Crowd, “throw your hands up at me!” Okay, maybe she doesn’t quite say that, but halfway through Thomas Vinterberg’s handsome, unremarkable new ta...
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