7 years ago
Reviews (10 posts found)
“Breathe” Is The New Classic Of Teen-Centric Cinema
Toxic friendships between teenage girls have given us some memorable cinema, from the sarcastic (Ghost World) to the cruel (The Craft) to the outright deadly (Heathers). If you believe Jennifer’s Body, hell is a teenage girl and two of them at war is enough to...
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“Coming Home” Is Bland And Ultimately Forgettable
If you were told that Coming Home was about a mother suffering from amnesia and the father and daughter who are forced to come to terms with the effects of her illness on them, you might assume that this was Hollywood’s latest attempt at an Oscar-bait prestige...
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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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“Dragon Blade” Is A Baffling Paradox
The collected forces of the Chinese entertainment economy entrusted Daniel Lee, director of the majestically incompetent historical epic Dragon Blade, with a $65 million budget for his newest feature. To provide some financial context, The Sparkle Roll Media C...
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“Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” Is Unsettling, But Only At Times
Alex Gibney’s Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine captures the titular Silicon Valley titan as a genius with questionable morals at best. During Jobs’ lifetime, his virtuosic output was front and center and the public overlooked, say, the fact that Apple put a ...
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“Blind” Is A Sharp, Pleasant Surprise
On paper, the premise of Blind is unassailably bleak: the recently blind Ingrid (Ellen Dorrit Petersen), having permanently lost her vision to an incurable genetic disease, confines herself to her apartment while her husband frets over her physical and psychol...
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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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“We Are Your Friends” Doesn’t Know Who It’s For
While the shiny beautiful people of Hollywood sip elaborate cocktails in their hilltop mansions, the common rabble toil away at crap day-jobs in the San Fernando Valley. As they live in the literal shadow of the lifestyle they covet, wide-eyed dreamers short o...
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Elisabeth Moss Is Why “Queen of Earth” Is So Earth-Shattering
Elisabeth Moss’s most famous performance to date, on television as Peggy Olson in Mad Men, is a work of layered complexity and a superb example of gradual character evolution, with Moss growing into the role as Peggy did into her male-dominated world, handling...
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