7 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“People Places Things” Is Unmemorable, Uninteresting, and Unamusing
For how unmemorable and uninteresting it is, writer/director James Strouse’s People Places Things may well have been called “Noun.” Having premiered at Sundance with little fanfare, likely amid a cacophony of similarly sickly twee dramedies, Strouse’s story of...
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“Cop Car” Starts Strong, But Sputters To A Finish
The first half-hour or so of director Jon Watts' Cop Car is such a model of lean, efficient storytelling that I initially thought I might be watching a new classic. Two 10-year old boys ( James Freedson-Jackson and Hays Wellford) have run away from home and ar...
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“Fantastic Four” Isn’t Terrible, Just Unremarkable
A cursory browse of the Internet suggests that the new Fantastic Four may as well be one of the worst films ever made: an Adam Sandleresque score on Low Hanging Fruit, unusually harsh user rating on the Internet Males Database, and widely reported tales of pro...
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“Ricki and the Flash” Is Recognizable, But Charming
In some ways, we’ve seen Ricki and the Flash before. With its focus on a broken family and a lengthy final sequence set at a wedding, Jonathan Demme’s latest picture sounds a lot like his 2008 feature Rachel Getting Married. Yet, by virtue of the heartfelt str...
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“Shaun the Sheep Movie” Is An Old-Fashioned Delight
Not a single word is spoken in Shaun the Sheep Movie, nor are any necessary. The latest film from Aardman Animations, this low-key story goes even further than Minions, where just the title characters speak only in gibberish. Here, everyone communicates in gru...
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“The Diary of a Teenage Girl” Is As Messy As Other Indie Teen Sex Dramedies
It's 1976 and, as she enthuses to her tape-recorder diary, 15-year-old Minnie Goetze (Bel Powley) has just had sex for the first time—with her mother’s (Kristen Wiig) boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). Based on the hybrid graphic novel/regular novel by P...
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“Listen to Me Marlon” Is A Worthy Tribute to Brando
You could thumb through a thesaurus all day and still not find sufficient hyperbole to describe Marlon Brando's impact on the craft of acting. A prize pupil of Stella Adler, who brought the Stanislavsky Method to America, Brando blew it all up. Overnight, the ...
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“Best of Enemies” Is A Shallow Look At A Political Pair
There was a time I fervently believed that there were no bad documentary subjects -- only bad documentaries. That anything could make for a good narrative, that any person could make for an interesting protagonist. A lot has changed since that time of my life ...
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“I Am Chris Farley” Avoids Exploring The Man’s Dark Side
Toward the end of I Am Chris Farley, Brent Hodge’s biography of the late, great comic force of nature, Bob Odenkirk measures the tragic circumference of Farley’s death in one quote: "It's just rare that a person has that much joy, and brings that much happines...
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“Rogue Nation” Is The Best “Mission: Impossible” Film So Far
Ethan Hunt (the 53-going-on-35 Tom Cruise) may not be considered a superhero, but he undoubtedly possesses powers that appear to be superhuman. He may not have a web to sling and his most impressive gadget continues to be a ludicrously transformative face-mask...
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