Posted August 21, 2013in Film Review
“Kick-Ass 2” 1 star Rated R 113 minutes Action Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse Exploitation-indoctrination cinema doesn’t come any more crass than this unnecessary follow-up to the first “Kick-Ass” (2010) movie. Adapting Mark Millar’s “creator-owned” comic book (illustrated by John Romita Jr.) to the movies is a
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Posted August 14, 2013in Film Review
“Lovelace” 3 stars Rated R 92 minutes Biography Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Peter Sarsgaard, Juno Temple “Lovelace” (mostly) succeeds as a brief biopic of Linda Boreman, a middle-class girl from Florida who became a household name — via her porn appellation “Linda Lovelace” — for which she made only one film,
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Posted August 07, 2013in Film Review
“Blue Jasmine” 2 stars Rated PG-13 98 minutes Drama Starring: Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin, Sally Hawkins Woody Allen has bottomed out. His latest attempt at interpreting yet another global mecca — this time San Francisco — through a prism of flailing romance, barely manages to elicit a couple of subdued
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Posted July 31, 2013in Film Review
“The Spectacular Now” 1 star Rated R 95 minutes Drama Starring: Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller, Jennifer Jason Leigh “The Spectacular Now” is the work of inexperienced screenwriters. We know this because of their handling — or rather mishandling — of the film’s underlying theme of teen alcoholism. The sophomoric script-writing
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Posted July 24, 2013in Film Review
“The Act of Killing” 5 stars Not Rated 122 minutes Documentary Starring: Haji Anif, Syamsul Arifin, Sakhyan Asmara At once the most micro and meta combination of cinéma vérité, documentary and docudrama filmmaking techniques ever assembled, Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Act of Killing” is an Earth-shattering cinematic experience. A challenging movie
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Posted July 17, 2013in Film Review
“The Conjuring” 3 stars R 112 minutes Horror Starring: Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Lili Taylor Since carving his name as a modern-horror director to be reckoned with, James Wan (“Saw” – 2006) has been moving steadily toward a less literal, more haunting, approach to the genre. “Insidious” (2010) evinced a
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Posted July 10, 2013in Film Review
“The Lone Ranger” 3 stars PG-13 149 minutes Action Starring: Johnny Depp, Armie Hammer, William Fichtner Perhaps more important than what Gore Verbinski’s gleefully postmodern Western isn’t, is what it is. Written by two screenwriters from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, along with Justin Haythe (“Revolutionary Road”), this deconstructionist
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Posted July 03, 2013in Film Review
“Man of Steel” 3 stars PG-13 143 minutes Action Starring: Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon Man of Steel delivers a fresh approach to the shop-worn Origin of Superman narrative (originally published in 1938). Alas, fresh is not enough. State-of-the-art special effects are deployed to deliver the double theme of
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Posted June 26, 2013in Film Review
“White House Down” 1 star PG-13 137 minutes Action Starring: Channing Tatum, Jamie Foxx, Maggie Gyllenhaal Copycat redundancies to the recent “Olympus Has Fallen” aside, “White House Down” is an unintentionally laughable action movie that wallows involuntary cynicism about how America — or screenwriter James Vanderbilt at least — views
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Posted June 19, 2013in Film Review
“Maniac” 2 stars Not Rated 89 minutes Horror Starring: Elijah Wood, America Olivo, Liane Balaban An irredeemable exploitation horror movie that overplays its subjective point-of-view conceit, “Maniac” will leave viewers cold. A by-committee screenplay, contributed to by Alexandre Aja (“High Tension”), updates William Lustig’s ’80s cult horror classic by the
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