7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
Identity Thief/Side Effects: Two Paths to High Concept Failure
D+
"Two high-concept roads diverged in an AMC
And sorry I had to travel both." - Robert Frost, 2/8/13
Identity Thief, the newest magnum opus by Seth Gordon, and Side Effects, the grandest of finales by Steven Soderbergh, are cut from the exact same clo...
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Would You Rather: A Solid Thriller That Will Challenge Your Mind and Your Constitution
B
We're used to "Would You Rather" as a sexually puerile party game, but with IFC Films' new release of the same name, suddenly there are real stakes and grisly consequences. Iris (Brittany Snow) is a bright, tenacious young woman beaten down by her cancer-...
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Lore: A Nation Divided; A Woman Torn
A-
World War II has been depicted so much in films that it's practically a genre. And like all genres, we've come to expect all that we could from any WWII movie. Also like all genres: After a while, there's bound to be someone willing to bring an original ...
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Stallone Goes Over the Hill in Bullet to the Head
C
Filled with too many jumpy, overexposed helicopter shots that recall a bad CSI-ripoff, the opening of Bullet to the Head hardly does justice to the man whose grimy retelling of Anabasis, The Warriors, made such intimate and frightening use of New York’s u...
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A Zombie Learns to Love in Charming Warm Bodies
B+
As humans, most of us want to feel something. Happiness, pain, anger, joy, sadness, depression, love. To feel is to be alive. R (an unusual, semi-conscious zombie played by Nicholas Hoult) doesn't remember what it was like to be human or to be connected ...
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‘Supporting Characters’ is a Charming Millennial Indie About Who You Can and Can’t Edit Out Of Your Life
B+
Sometimes the most difficult reviews to write are of the movies you like the most. Consider that mere hours after I suffered through Movie 43, I could spit out a scathing takedown. But for every agonizing attempt at humor like Movie 43, there's a true co...
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Parker: When A Movie Seems To Simply… Exist
C
There's nothing especially bad about Parker, 2013's first entry into the Jason Statham filmography. There's nothing especially good either. I was never bored, yet I was never enthralled. We get a few entertaining if implausible heists, a few violent and f...
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Movie 43: A Bigger Waste Of The Audience’s Money Or The Actors’ Time?
D-
I'm usually very forgiving with bad movies. My top 10 list each year usually includes one stinker because I value pure entertainment, even if that means I'm screaming with disgust or laughing at wooden acting. But not even I can pardon Movie 43, the utte...
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Amour: Cry Me a Riva
A
Michael Haneke is a filmmaker who has been fascinated by suffering throughout his career. Be it the stalker notes in Cache or the punishment ritual in The White Ribbon, tension and fear of death (or worse) has always been front and center in his films. In...
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The Last Stand: Something Old, Something New
B+
Christmas morning. Tiny puppies licking my face. A plate of crispy bacon. The embrace of a loved one. The last forty-five minutes of The Last Stand.
As I walked home from the theatre after watching Kim Ji-Woon's first American production, The Last Sta...
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