8 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“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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“Z for Zachariah” Is Promising, But Frustrating
Recent post-apocalyptic films, from Zombieland to 28 Days Later have, to some degree kept their distance from religion—at least in an explicit sense. It's easy to link these world-weary genre pieces to theological themes in a more subtextual way, with very few...
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“Turbo Kid” Is Deliberately, Willfully Cheesy And Dumb
The post-apocalyptic future of Turbo Kid might be set in 1997, but the film’s stylistic sensibility is straight from the 1980s. That’s the point, of course; the whole film is intended as an ode to the campy gewgaws of ’80s pop culture. It’s a movie that’s abou...
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“Call Me Lucky” Is A Deeply Affecting Tribute To A Comic’s Comic
A hulking bear of a man with a handlebar moustache takes the stage, puffing on a cigarette and swigging from a bottle of beer, announcing: “So I’ve been on kind of a health kick lately.” The man is Barry Crimmins, the “comedian’s comic” who helped launch Bosto...
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“Digging for Fire” Is The Most Swanberg-ish Film Yet
With another year comes another Joe Swanberg joint about middle-class ennui. There are any number of reasons to roll one’s eyes at the prolific indie filmmaker’s latest, Digging For Fire—its blatant heteronormativity, adherence to traditional gender roles, uns...
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“Sinister 2” Is Numbing Instead of Frightening
An old house, precocious children, ghosts, and a troubled past haunting a family. At first glance and on paper, Ciarán Foy’s Sinister 2, the haphazard and poorly written sequel to the focused and contrastingly minimal horror flick Sinister (2012), has all the ...
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