9 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“Fifi Howls From Happiness” A Rich, Vivid, And Unpredictable Iranian Documentary
The history of 20th-century Iran is brimming with fascinating, complex tales of personal and social travails and triumph. The country went through name changes, revolutions, several dynasties, countless heads of state, and the Islamicization of the government ...
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Remember the Fallen, and Forget “After”
How often does a film come along that truly, deeply pisses you off? More than that: how often does a film come along that completely offends your sensibilities and repulses you to your very core? Perhaps no more frequently than masterpieces, movies that remind...
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“What If” A Perfectly Fine, But Instantly Forgettable Romantic Comedy
Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl. Girl has a boyfriend. Womp woooomp. Boy spends the rest of a 100-minute movie in a weird relationship limbo with girl, something more than a friend, but of course, never a romantic partner. The premise is repeated for the benefi...
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“About Alex” and the Way We Live Now
It sounds familiar: a group of upwardly mobile, mostly white friends reconvene a few years after college and wind up bringing old loves and regrets to light. There are quite a few movies like this, but they all huddle together in the shadow of the 1983's The B...
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“Calvary” A Grim, Existential Take on Catholic Guilt Bolstered by Brendan Gleeson
Sean Burns: Well, Jake, who better, I guess, than two red-faced Irish pricks from Boston to sit down over a couple of pints and jaw on about Calvary, writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s mordantly funny and deeply sad meditation on a higher calling in a fal...
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“Behaving Badly” Is Head-Shakingly Awful
Sometimes, you watch a movie that's so instantly and painfully bad that you imagine it cannot top itself in terms of sheer, head-shaking awfulness. And then Gary Busey shows up as a local sheriff, so that he can spew his patented brand of craziness on screen f...
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“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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“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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