9 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“Guardians of the Galaxy” Gunns For Greatness
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a Marvel movie is just a Marvel movie. But when a Marvel movie has former Troma bad boy James Gunn stationed at the helm, orchestrating a grand space opera peppered with off-radar characters with no mainstream c...
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“Get On Up” Comes Alive Only When The Godfather of Soul Is On Stage
Just as James Brown was the hardest working man in show business, the new biography of his life often feels like the hardest working movie in show business, although it's far less successful. Get On Up sometimes feels like a standard-issue "Behind the Music"-e...
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In “Child of God”, No Country For James Franco
Taking Child of God seriously is as demanding a task as simply sitting through it. Consider the source: James Franco, career class clown and current aspiring auteur, at least according to his expanding tally of directorial ventures (most recently, As I Lay Dyi...
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Love and Down’s Syndrome Battle In “Yo, también”
This Spanish coming-of-age romance about a man with Down's syndrome approaches its subject with respectful, nuanced grace.
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“Hercules” Better Than Its Drab Marketing Would Lead You To Believe
Hercules was withheld from the press before its release, which is not generally a vote of confidence from a studio on the behalf of one of its films. But Paramount needn't have worried so much about this, because it's far from terrible. That, of course, is har...
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“Very Good Girls” Is A Delicate, Heartfelt Coming-Of-Age Tale
If you've never been a 19-year old girl, to paraphrase The Virgin Suicides, you might not get the gravity of Lilly's (Dakota Fanning) and Gerri's (Elizabeth Olsen) dilemmas in Very Good Girls. But the path these girls are following during their last summer bef...
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In “Lucy,” Scarlett Johansson Accesses 100% Of Her Awesomeness
And now for something completely different: Luc Besson presents Cosmos. Wet blankets across the Internet will invariably find a reason to fault Lucy, Besson's latest, for leaning on urban legends and pseudo-science as the make-up of its basic conceit. If Neil ...
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“Happy Christmas” An Enjoyable Mumblecore Entry
Am I supposed to have an opinion on mumblecore? Because I honestly don't. And I feel like any review of a Joe Swanberg film is supposed to be prefaced with some expounding on how the writer feels about mumblecore, as it's a style that draws reactions in a very...
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“Magic in the Moonlight” An Unabashedly Romantic and Optimistic Entry in Woody Allen’s Career
What a period of refinement this is for Woody Allen. With last year’s Blue Jasmine, 2011’s Midnight in Paris, and now Magic in the Moonlight, the storied writer-director has ushered in his most confident work in years, maybe decades, as he maintains his one-fi...
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“A Most Wanted Man” A Precise And Moody Curtain Call for Philip Seymour Hoffman
The bulk of the planning for the September 11th attacks did not take place in an Afghan manse or a Saudi backroom -- it happened in an apartment in Hamburg, Germany. Contrary to what the public may think, terrorism is not Middle Eastern, not even Islamic terro...
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