8 years ago
All posts by Sean Burns
“Strangerland”
There’s a lot of intrigue and very little of interest in director Kim Farrant’s debut feature. It’s a movie of elisions and withholding, parceling out information at a snail’s pace while simmering in an overheated, eroticized atmosphere that promises far more ...
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“Terminator: Genisys”
To watch James Cameron’s 1984 The Terminator again is to marvel at its ruthless narrative efficiency and the craft of making a great deal out of very little. It’s such a tightly scripted, self-contained little B-movie masterpiece that the film demanded a serie...
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“Big Game”
With nostalgia currently holding the box office in a raptor claw, it's amusing to discover that this summer's most purely enjoyable throwback to those 1980s Steven Spielberg-produced Amblin entertainments is not, in fact, the Steven Spielberg-produced Amblin e...
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“Into the Grizzly Maze”
Not exactly terrible, at least as far as this sort of nature-spolitation schlock goes, Saw V director David Hackl’s Into the Grizzly Maze strands an overqualified cast in the Alaskan wilderness to work out their longstanding family grudges with a thousand-poun...
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“Live From New York!”
A couple years back, I interviewed Bill Hader, who told me of a hilarious-sounding Alan Alda sketch he'd pitched for "Saturday Night Live," only to be shot down by executive producer Lorne Michaels with the query: "Why now?"
It's a question that could just as...
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“Aloha”
To explain it in the most Cameron Crowe terms possible: watching Aloha is like hearing a new album by one of those bands you loved in high school, but you’ve both kinda gone your separate ways.
There was a time, however brief and wonderful, when this band see...
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“Absolution”
There’s an extraordinary moment at the very end of the new Steven Seagal picture, Absolution, that almost makes it worth watching. Since said moment is one of the very last shots, and sitting through this entire movie is not something I would wish upon an enem...
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“Every Secret Thing”
Sometimes there’s so much talent involved in a terrible movie that you find yourself staring at the screen, wondering what the hell happened. Such is the case with Every Secret Thing, a middling little number that feels like a rejected pilot for one of those s...
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“Hot Pursuit”
Hot Pursuit doesn’t aspire to much. It’s basically a throwaway lark that you can easily imagine producer-star Reese Witherspoon cooked up as a way to kick back and relax after exhausting herself with the performance of her career both in front of and behind th...
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“5 Flights Up”
Modest in ambition and charm, 5 Flights Up, a deftly played two-hander starring Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton, feels a lot like a Hallmark Channel movie that just so happened to land a couple of cinema legends in leading roles. But movie-star charisma goes a...
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