Category Archives: Reviews
High-concept films are a tricky thing to pull off. If a novel concept isn't supported with good filmmaking, you might get people in for the opening weekend, but they won't come back to see your movie again. Then there are some high-concept films where just from the title, you know it's going to b...
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Mark Wahlberg's new film Broken City is, in a word, broken. There is so much left unsaid as well as unfinished in this movie, the audience is left with way too much to fill in the blanks. There are problems with open-ended romances. There are problems with insinuated relationships that may or may...
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Imagine becoming a foster parent for the first time and your task is to raise two small children who have lived isolated in an abandoned cabin for five years. And as if that isn't challenging enough, the girls are also being haunted by a spirit that has followed them from the cabin. This is the s...
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While certainly loud, somewhat sexy, and decked out in all the accurate aesthetic trappings of 1930s Los Angeles, Gangster Squad turns out to be merely a dim cousin to sincere works like L.A. Confidential or Michael Mann’s intimate Public Enemies due to a battery of corny, faux-noir line readin...
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Okay if you lived through the 1960s and/or you have a love for classic rock. That just about sums up David Chase's debut film, Not Fade Away. The film, which takes its title from an early Rolling Stones song (which is, in fact, a cover of a Buddy Holly song), is the coming of age story of three h...
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Since its debut in 1980, Les Misérables, the musical based on the 1862 French novel of the same title by Victor Hugo, has become a true phenomenon of the stage. And like many fans of Les Mis, as it's colloquially known, I wondered if the long-rumored movie adaptation would ever emerge from the d...
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This is 40 takes us back to Pete (Paul Rudd), wife Debbie (Leslie Mann) and daughters Sadie and Charlotte (Mann and writer/director Judd Apatow’s real-life children Maude and Iris) who we meet up with again five years after the events of Knocked Up. Apparently turning 40 means it's midlife-cris...
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Jack Reacher, a film about a former Military Police Major turned drifter/justice dispenser, stars Tom Cruise as the title character involved in a defense case with Helen Rodin (Rosamund Pike), a stunning and sharp lawyer who has taken on the task of trying to keep a man convicted of killing five ...
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Word is that Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand had a really good time together filming The Guilt Trip, according to their press interviews, and I’m happy for them. I’m not sure their audiences will fare as well. Both are definitely forces in the entertainment world, but the script for this movi...
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The film, Playing for Keeps is a slightly above average romantic comedy that is more about the beautiful Scottish actor Gerard Butler than anything else. Who will enjoy this film? My best guess would be; women and soccer fans. The story starts out with scenes from George’s (Gerard Butler) he...
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Even if it were not for Keira Knightley’s odd facial tics and total lack of intensity, Joe Wright’s lavishly-staged adaptation of Tolstoy’s Russian literature cornerstone Anna Karenina would still play like the tragic romance Oprah Winfrey thought she selected for her book club and made an ...
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