8 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“Yakuza Apocalypse” Is Loony and Incoherent
Somewhere near the climax of Takashi Miike’s unclassifiable new action flick Yakuza Apocalypse — a film arguably made up entirely of climaxes of differing intensity — a mysterious combatant in a ratty fleece frog suit reveals his final form. Battle with a rovi...
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“Addicted to Fresno” Has Surprisingly Little to Say
Nothing about Jamie Babbit’s Addicted to Fresno sounds bad on paper. Babbit has helmed episodes of Girls, Married, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in her career, while her partner, Karey Dornetto, has penned installments of Portlandia and vintage Arrested Development; ...
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“Deathgasm” Is Gleefully Over-the-Top
It’s best to think of Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm as the spiritual kin of Brendon Small’s great Adult Swim series Metalocalypse. They’re both gleefully over-the-top odes to all things metal—from the music to its ethos and iconography. Metalocalypse ran from 2...
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“Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon” Is A Flavorless, Unintelligent Trek
Reason #275839 why Aaron Sorkin’s mercifully short-lived series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip didn’t work out was its unduly inflated sense of importance. Everyone within the show spoke of the titular comedy institution with a hushed reverence usually reserved...
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“The Intern” Gets Only Partial Credit
Nancy Meyers wants you to know just how much she loathes the term “chick flick,” and with good reason. She’s had to deal with the condescending label time and again over her 35-year career as a writer, producer, and director, as though her work, though occasio...
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“99 Homes” Is Ungraceful and Bland
Ripped from the headlines of several years ago and plastered onto theater screens is 99 Homes, which transmutes the subprime-mortgage crisis into a broad morality play. Writer/director Ramin Bahrani has recently made it his “thing” to bring forth relevant mess...
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“Mississippi Grind” Is A Toast to Beautiful Losers
Mississippi Grind is a low-stakes movie about high-stakes people who flirt with life and death. Films about gamblers tend toward the tragic more often than they do the comedic (Ocean’s Eleven films notwithstanding), but Mississippi Grind never quite imposes a ...
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“The Keeping Room” Is Exceedingly Difficult To Watch
A title card tells us it’s 1865, followed by a quote from William Tecumseh Sherman – so we all know what’s coming. Director Daniel Barber’s grim, handsomely mounted The Keeping Room wallows in that mournful inevitability, substituting dread for suspense. It’s ...
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“Black Mass” Is An Ugly, Droning Nothing Of A Movie
What an ugly, droning nothing of a movie director Scott Cooper’s Black Mass turns out to be. This much-ballyhooed (at least here in Boston) take on the frankly exhausted Whitey Bulger mythos has nothing new nor particularly interesting to say, cycling through ...
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“Everest” Loses Its Footing Despite Looking Great
A great mystery of mankind is why we feel the desire to tackle the impossible, to face off against a challenge that few, if any, men or women could surmount. Why do people climb Mount Everest? The familiar adage, courtesy of Edmund Hillary, is “because it’s th...
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