8 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“99 Homes” Is Ungraceful and Bland
Ripped from the headlines of several years ago and plastered onto theater screens is 99 Homes, which transmutes the subprime-mortgage crisis into a broad morality play. Writer/director Ramin Bahrani has recently made it his “thing” to bring forth relevant mess...
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“Mississippi Grind” Is A Toast to Beautiful Losers
Mississippi Grind is a low-stakes movie about high-stakes people who flirt with life and death. Films about gamblers tend toward the tragic more often than they do the comedic (Ocean’s Eleven films notwithstanding), but Mississippi Grind never quite imposes a ...
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“The Keeping Room” Is Exceedingly Difficult To Watch
A title card tells us it’s 1865, followed by a quote from William Tecumseh Sherman – so we all know what’s coming. Director Daniel Barber’s grim, handsomely mounted The Keeping Room wallows in that mournful inevitability, substituting dread for suspense. It’s ...
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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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“Everest” Loses Its Footing Despite Looking Great
A great mystery of mankind is why we feel the desire to tackle the impossible, to face off against a challenge that few, if any, men or women could surmount. Why do people climb Mount Everest? The familiar adage, courtesy of Edmund Hillary, is “because it’s th...
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“Sicario” Needs More Substance And More Emily Blunt
If Doug Liman’s thoroughly entertaining sci-fi flick Edge of Tomorrow demonstrated and reinforced anything besides the inexhaustible movie stardom of Tom Cruise, it was that Emily Blunt was an action heroine of her own accord, more than capable of holding her ...
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“Sleeping With Other People” Is Thoroughly Enjoyable
Sleeping with Other People, writer-director Lesyle Headland's follow-up to Bachelorette (2012), saws off the more robustly salty bits of her first film in favor of a safe-in-the-arms-of-formula romantic comedy starring Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis as Lainey ...
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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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“Goodnight Mommy” Fails To Come Together As A Horror Film
Even though its story isn’t what the virally-spooky trailers are selling it as, this still seems like the kind of movie I should love. An austerely produced, beautifully shot dark fable about children’s resentment of their parents, it’s sound on paper. But in ...
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“The Visit” Is M. Night Shyamalan’s Best Film Since “Signs”
In the late summer of 1999, two low-budget movies intended to scare audiences helped change one aspect of the mainstream-cinema landscape: the bare-bones found-footage horror film The Blair Witch Project and the spooky psychological thriller The Sixth Sense, w...
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