Kim Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts as we meet them in Trouble the Water
One sign of a good documentary filmmaker is the ability to shift gears and abandon preconceived notions when a story changes unexpectedly. In the case of Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, the story that became their hurricane Katrina documentary Trouble the Water [...]
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Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson in Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Like a fleeting love affair in a beautiful foreign country, Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is probably best appreciated for what it is rather than analyzed for what it means. It’s a bit of a trifle to be sure, but a supremely engaging and entertaining one. More [...]
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Seth Rogen, James Franco and Danny R. McBride take the Pineapple Express
On first viewing, the true measure of a comedy is how much it makes you laugh. If you laugh enough, you’re able to forget whatever other flaws it might have. If the laughs stop however, the movie underneath better deliver in some other way [...]
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Misty Upham and Melissa Leo in Frozen River
Melissa Leo is Ray Eddy, a working mother living in rural upstate New York. Raising two sons, a 5-year-old and a 15-year old, she’s married but her husband is a gambling addict. As the movie begins, he has run off with the money she’d set aside for a [...]
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1.5 laughs
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Image ©2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images
“If I die, what a beautiful death. To die in the exercise of your passion.” - Philippe Petit
“It was so beautiful. It was like he was walking on a cloud.” - Annie Allix
It’s difficult to watch a man walking a tightrope between the two towers of New York’s World [...]
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High school senior Hannah Bailey in American Teen
In 2005, filmmaker Nanette Burstein (The Kid Stays in the Picture) filmed the lives of five Warsaw Indiana High School seniors over the course of ten months. She then narrowed down 1000 hours of footage and the result is American Teen, a documentary that traces every up and [...]
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Uneasy lies the head that wears the cowl
With The Dark Knight, director co-writer Christopher Nolan doesn’t get on his knees to grovel for audience acceptance. Instead, he grabs the superhero genre by its cape, slaps it across the face and says it’s time to get serious. Regular comic book readers won’t be surprised by the [...]
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Hellboy II: More than just a comic book movie
Forget about what you know or think you know about the original Hellboy movie. Hellboy II: The Golden Army is something else altogether. If the first was an amusing throwaway twist on a tired genre, the latter is some kind of nerd poetry infused with the joy [...]
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Marie-Josée Croze and François Cluzet in Tell No One
Based upon the novel by Harlan Coben, Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne) is a surprising French mystery thriller written and directed by Guillaume Canet. Taking a familiar missing-wife/husband-accused storyline, the movie is spun into something altogether more satisfying by keeping the plot and action [...]
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The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their luck as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, [...]
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The Devil: 1, Hoffman and Hawke: 0
When is a caper film not a caper film? When the ins and outs of the standard caper plot are not the focus, but instead are used to illustrate and emphasize a deeper, more fulfilling drama. That’s the trick Sidney Lumet has pulled off with Before the Devil Knows [...]
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The LA Times reports that Spider-Man 4 is coming in 2011.
(sound of crickets chirping)
Since #3 combined at least three potentially good movies into one bad one, I’m not sure what there is left to do next. Plus, they don’t have a director a script or a star. Ah well, they only need a franchise character and a [...]
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I was a scrawny kid growing up, but I never idolized the muscle-bound types. Bodybuilding was always a bore, I hated the He-Man cartoon, I didn’t worship Arnold Schwartzenegger or Sylvester Stallone and I never took professional wrestling seriously. Ordinarily I wouldn’t be interested in a documentary about three Hulk Hogan idolizing boys from New [...]
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“Hello. My name is Bruce Banner and I’m a rageaholic.”
Ang Lee sure ruined the Hulk. No, I’m not talking about the 2003 movie where he had the temerity to try injecting real adult emotion into a comic book story. I’m talking about the new 2008 incarnation that is so desperate to forget Lee ever happened, [...]
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