Obsession
If I were Hollywood, I'd be worried. I mean, sure, box office is through the floor, the middle-class backbone of the industry moved out of...
Moviegique Archive
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A Blind Bargain
When you go into a movie called A Blind Bargain starring Crispin Glover and which bills itself as a "reimagining" of a lost 1922 horror movie as a...
The Sheep Detectives
I had the most amazing experience recently, and it took several months to occur. A few months ago, I saw a trailer for a movie called The Sheep...
I Swear
The story of the disrupted award ceremony was funny before I saw the movie I Swear, but after having seen it? It's hilarious. This is a movie about a...
Hokum
Damian McCarthy is back! The director of my favorite horror of 2024 (Oddity) gives another masterclass in moody ghost storytelling set in the...
Lumiere, The Cinema
Rather embarrassingly for a moviegique, I had mistaken Lumière for Méliès, but in either case this was a must-see documentary. Georges Méliès was the...
A Magnificent Life
The films that we have an opportunity to see are highly curated in a number of ways which I am not going to pretend to fully understand. French films...
Over Your Dead Body
The Boy and I had a blast at this violent Jorma Taccone (MacGruber) black-comedy, but I couldn't help but notice this was the second...
The Drama
A24 doesn't just make horror films, but their films are often inflected with horror sensibilities. While The Drama looks like a kind of screwball...
The French Connection (1971)
When watching five-time Oscar winner, The French Connection, which won for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Editing and Best Writing,...
The Lady From Shanghai (1947)
Orson Welles wasn't very good at making movies. I mean, sure, his cinematography is breathtaking, his sense of pacing thrilling, his ability to turn...
Sorcerer (1977)
On the website-formerly-known-as-Twitter the other day, engagement bait was centered around the question "What director had the best three-movie...
Project Hail Mary
I've been goofing on this film since it came out. I mean, look, it rocketed up the IMDB top 250 ahead of Jaws, Raging Bull, The Big Lebowski and...
Two Prosecutors
A young, freshly minted lawyer in the USSR in 1937 discovers that dissidents are being tortured by a corrupt NKVD, and seeks to use the ostensible...
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch
Halloween: 3, Moviegoers: 0 I kid the third entry in the Halloween series. Because it's awful. But as it's one of Darcy The Mail Girl's favorite...
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
Orson Welles' follow-up to Citizen Kane is the touching, tragic tale of an American family that rose to riches and prominence in the 19th...
Playtime (1967)
French auteur Jacques Tati made four films featuring his affably chaotic character, Monsieur Hulot, of which the second and third films are generally...
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
I was talking to a friend (who's been on a David Lean kick) about this movie, and she sighed and said "I hate...today." This isn't so much a...
Brief Encounter (1945)
David Lean directed Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Dr. Zhivago (1965) back-to-back, garnering 19 Oscars out of 34...
ARCO
France's entry into the 2025 Carnal Olympics—I mean, Best Animated Feature Oscar is about the okayist of okay flicks to ever be presented as a...
Klaus (2019)
This holiday season has offered a really limited slate of films, for reasons I don't quite understand. It might be that the third Avatar movie was...
The Whale
I was standing outside the exhibition room door, waiting for The Boy to season his popcorn (caramel & cheesy jalapeno!), reading the poster and...
Rental Family
If he hadn't had his career derailed by a series of mishaps and downright evil, Brendan Fraser would be alongside Tom Hanks in terms of being the...
Bugonia
Another day, another Yorgos Lanthimos film. That's a slight exaggeration, though Bugonia is his third film in short order. Poor Things, came late in...
If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You
A24 has made a name for itself as a purveyor of odd, artsy and sometimes divisive horror flicks. And while this has created a kind of aura of...
Ju Dou (1990)
Chinese director Zhang Yimou's breakthrough film Raise The Red Lantern (1991) lost the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar to Meditarraneo, but he's...
Chainsaws Were Singing
If you see only ONE Estonian horror musical this year, make it Chainsaws Were Singing! How's that for a log line? Well, I guess it's not really a log...
Joe Bob's Halloween Spooktacular: The Tingler (1959)
In leiu of the traditional "Mutant Meetup" (which took place in Pennsylvania, Memphis, and the last two years in Vegas), Joe Bob and Darcy had a one...
Trick 'r Treat (2007)
The fall typically brings a spate of horror films as moviegoers seeking safe thrills head to the cineplex in advance of Halloween, which...
A House of Dynamite
I just got through reading Dan Brown's Deception Point for the "372 Pages We'll Never Get Back" podcast and boy are my arms tired! No, wait, wrong...
Dead of Winter
"Emma Thompson is the love child of Marge Gunderson and Rambo" is your high concept take on Dead of Winter, the new thriller from Brian Kirk (best...
Chain Reactions
Let's talk about people talking about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, fifty-one years old next week. (October 11th, 1974.) This is an odd documentary. I...
The Long Walk
If I said to you The Long Walk is a good film—for boomer fascist fantasy torture porn, would you forget the first part of the sentence by the time...
Weapons
A funny thing happened on the way to the movie thread. In the last three weeks, we saw five films. All of them were new releases. All but one were...
The Life of Chuck
The Life of Chuck is a three part story told backwards which, during the first part—actually the last part narratively, gawrdangit I hate it when...
Eddington
My review of any Ari Aster movie is going to be "I liked it, but I can't really recommend it to almost anyone." Hereditary is his most normal of...
Return of the Living Dead
It was another good fortnight-and-a-half at 'casa 'gique, starting with the indie/arty/actorly Everything's Going To Be Great, where a theater kid...
Mission: Impossible 8 - The Final Reckoning
We saw a lot of good and interesting movies this past fortnight-and-a-half. Bring Her Back, a melancholy horror from the makers of Talk To The Hand,...
Lilly
It's been kind of a slow May around here. We've only seen Ran, Re-Animator and Lilly. I've had a hard time getting into Kurosawa, but I found Ran...
Pride & Prejudice (2005)
It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by the (self-proclaimed) most die-hard fans of Austen that the '90s British miniseries...
Warfare
Alex Garland is a talented director. I think. A novelist who transitioned to movies with scripts like 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd, he made a...
The Ballad of Wallis Island
A down-and-out former pop star receives an invitation to a remote English island to perform a greatest hits concert from his time as part of an...
When Fall Is Coming
I know! French, right? I thought I'd get that out of the way up front, since you know it's coming when I review a French film. Let's see if you can...
The Rule of Jenny Pen
If "hag horror" is a thing—and with examples like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Strait-jacketwho can deny that it is?—might there be a...
Presence
Steven Soderbergh. While best known for his breakout film Sex, Lies and Videotape, his award winning films like Erin Brockovich and Traffic, his...
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Talking with an old friend. He mentions a scene from The Big Lebowski. "That's playing tonight. About 45 minuets." "Really? Where?" "The Nu-Art."...
The Count of Monte Cristo (2024)
Alexandre Dumas may be the most popular French writer in cinema, with hundreds of credits to his name based on his classic adventure stories like The...
Blood Simple (1984)
The amazing thing about this debut feature from the Coen Brothers, after the fact that it works so well, is how much of their cinematic language was...
End of Year Movie Roundup
The end of the year numbers are looking pre-pandemic levels, with over 100 films seen in theaters and drive-ins all over the country! (OK, Los...
December Movie Roundup
Some movie capsules to contemplate. Next time, I'll do my "best of the year". Spoiler: It's Hundreds of Beavers. I have no idea why these people are...
November Movie Roundup
The Los Angeles-Israeli Film Festive kind of snuck up on us this year, and it doesn't look like The Boy and I will be able to catch any of them, but...
The Bad and The Beautiful
Just as I sometimes will avoid a movie that's too over-hyped, knowing that most movies can't live up to the buzz, I occasionally will see movies that...
Fourth Annual World Drive-In Jamboree: An Evening With John Carpenter (Prince of Darkness/The Thing)
I'm a fan of Joe Bob Briggs, the premier drive-in movie critic of Grapevine, Texas, going back to the '80s when I first caught a glimpse of him on...
"Deadpool & Wolverine" vs "Victory"
It's that time of the year again: Spooky season! Which for us begins with the first day of Knott's Halloween Haunt, always a Thursday. (And which,...
Oddity, The Vourdalak and Red Desert
There were a couple of points of note on our journey to see the Irish horror film, Oddity. It had opened on July 19th, after a flurry of other horror...
MaXXXine, Longlegs, Kill, Kinds of Kindness and More!
The paucity of big summer flicks aside, or perhaps due to said paucity, it's been a pretty good moviegoing summer. Sure, Inside Out 2, Bad Boys 4 and...
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
As I said to The Boy this very day, "My lack of devotion to franchises has saved me a lot of grief over the years." I never cared about Wars or Treks...
Late Night With The Devil
The most preposterous element of the '70s-based recent horror flick Late Night With The Devil is the notion that anyone—even the Devil himself—could...
Hundreds of Beavers
How often do we see a movie that is exactly what it says on the tin? Since mainstream movies aren't all named "Soulless Crap", those are out. But...
Drive-Away Dolls
Drive, don't walk, away from Drive-Away Dolls. Ha! That's my best Jay Sherman impression, right there. Unfortunately, it also reflets my feelings...
Poor Things
Yorgos Lanthimos. I like the way that sounds: YorGOS LANthiMOS! Sorry, I can't see a movie from this bizarre Greek filmmaker without going on about...
Holidays at the Extremes, Part Deux
Last time, I noted a bunch of movies I had gone to in the recent weeks, and ran out of room: At casa 'gique, we're back to pre-lunacy moviegoing...
Holidays at the Extremes
We had a lot of fun during the Mandated Lockdown—insofar as one can have fun under such circumstances—coming up with lists of Christmas classics, as...
The Place Called Palestine
By far the highest population of Jews in the world is in New York City (where the mayor just last night told them to "shelter in place"). Jerusalem...
Publish or Perish
The third annual World Drive-In Movie Festival and Jamboree put on by Joe Bob Briggs, Darcy the Mail Girl and the cast and crew of "The Last...
Jules
I have lamented, particularly since the lockdowns ended, that while there have been some very good movies, the quality films that I could generally...
The Sound of Freedom
I've been tracking the phenom that is The Sound of Freedom since it came out on Independence Day and beat the last entry in the Indiana Jones series,...
It Ain't Over
If you are of a certain age, you probably heard the name "Yogi Berra" and thought "Yogi Bear? What?" because the rest of the sentence, about being...
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
These days, the theaters are in such disarray, even Angela Lansbury can't get much love. I say this as I look around for movies and all the things...
Bubba Ho-Tep
When he introduced this at the Jamboree, Joe Bob described the backstory as: Joe Lansdale (Cold In July) was having trouble getting his work produced...
Only In Theaters
The Laemmle Theater chain is a local Los Angeles area institution going back to the '30s, when it was founded by one of Carl Laemmle's cousins. (Carl...
Three Times Is Enemy Action.
A funny thing happened at the movies: We saw an actual movie! Then another! And a third! The Boy and I love weird, arty, indie flicks, but it seemed...
Experiments In Terror
"Sometimes I write poems that fail and I call those experiments." I don't know where I picked that up from, but I have attributed it in my head to...
A Man For All Seasons (1966)
The extended award season, finally receding into the future haze of "What won for best song in 2023?"*, always tends to pique me: What is great? From...
Linoleum
Cameron Edward, a fiftyish host of a failed kid's TV show, is having a difficult time. His wife, Erin, doesn't respect him. His daughter isn't too...
Living
I was going to subject you all to a post about The Whale but an eleventh hour viewing the new Bill Nighy picture, Living, changed my mind. They are,...
Broker
The anti-Japanese animus is so prevalent in Korean pop cinema, I sometimes forget to take note when I leave the theater of all the Koreans walking...
Holy Spider
In 2000 and 2001, a serial killer ran amok in Iran killing prostitutes. Serial killers killing prostitutes is probably as old as prostitutes, or...
Decision To Leave
Most of the Korean movies we go see are what you might call "popcorn movies". (I mean, for us all movies are popcorn movies, and I think we take some...
Emergency Declaration
I saw this one alongside Hansan, which made for a terrific double-feature. Where the historical drama reinforces the idea of Korea, the country,...
Terrifier 2
I was not exactly clamoring to see Terrifier 2, the sequel to the barely noticed (by me) 2016 movie Terrifier, about a slasher Killer Klown-type...
Frantic (2021)
A group of young men approaching their 30th birthdays and who have frustrated theatrical aspirations take one last stab at becoming a success by...
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
How about some Spanish surrealism? No? I'm not surprised. Luis Buñuel famously got his start pairing up with Salvador Dali for Un chien andalou (An...
Halloween (1978)
Horror movies, like classic Pixar movies, tend to be based on fun but flimsy pretexts that can make for a wildly entertaining moments but which hard...
To Leslie
One of the ways I used to amuse myself at the end of the year is by going to Box Office Mojo and looking at the bottom of the list to see which...
Pearl
I didn't have a chance to catch X, Ty West's slasher about a porn crew in the '70s that goes out to make a movie in a rural area only to be...
Hansan: Rising Dragon
It is odd to simultaneously recognize The Myth and its use in keeping entrenched power systems entrenched while simultaneously enjoying the...
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAN! KHAAAAAAAAN! Wait, I think he's actually saying "HAAAAM!" OK, I'm fine now. Just had to get it out of my system. Beam...
...and Mary rode Joseph's ass to Bethlehem...
It's that time of the year again, when we misplace Christmas by spreading it from August to December 25th, instead of starting it on Christmas Eve,...
High Society (1956)
Years ago, TCM played The Philadelphia Story and followed it immediately with High Society. I loved the former, and five minutes into the latter,...
Four For October
It's been a pretty good year for horror. Per IMDB, there have been 10,858 horror feature films released in 2022—not counting TV movies or...
Heaven Can Wait (1943)
I am far behind on my movie reviews, which happened a lot a few years ago, but which I had been rather disciplined about since about 2015. The...
Horror Hosts and The Birth of Meta
The Boy and I had gone down to Knott's for a daytime tour of the Halloween Haunt, and since the park is right next to the Korean movie theater, I had...
The Machiavellians: Four Films From The Perspective Of National Narratives
I recently read The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by John Burnham, one of two books Michael Malice recommends (along with The Righteous Mind)...
My Donkey, My Lover and I
My long-running gag whenever reviewing a French film is to wait until the movie strikes its inevitably libertine sexual plot-point and say, "I know,...
Apples
During a worldwide pandemic, sudden amnesia is striking people and forcing them to start new lives completely removed from their old existences. And...
Maverick: Top Gun
OK, let's put our cards on the table: The '80s were really stupid, and nowhere was this more clearly reflected than in the cinema. Except maybe the...
The Fifth Element (25th Anniversray)
I was wondering to myself when I wrote this up: Was Luc Besson ever very successful? Wiki says The Fifth Element "was a strong financial success,...
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On
A young boy and his grandmother who have been separated from their family enlist the help of a documentarian to reunite. There's a concise capsule...
Black Phone
The Boy said, after the movie was over, that he found himself thinking "Hey, this is a lot like a Stephen King story...but a Christian is shown in a...
Joe Bob's Drive-In Jamboree: Sunday
In a vain attempt to reduce the size of my coverage of Joe Bob's Drive-In Jamboree, I summarized a lot of things. Then that was too long, so I split...
Cha Cha Real Smooth
The sixth and final film in our accidental series of passion projects, this one written and directed by Cooper Raiff, Cha Cha Real Smooth is the...
Joe Bob's Drive-In Jamboree: Friday and Saturday
I have a massive write-up already on the whole weekend in Memphis, where we spent all night watching drive-in movies, the days in a convention, and...
Wild Men
We were on a streak of seeing truly odd and unusual movies—unique, even—when we decided to catch this more conventional Danish film about a...
Ninja Badass
Resisting the urge to see Mad God again when venturing down to the tony side of town, the Boy and I opted to see Ninja Badass on its last day. It was...
Mad God
I had spotted this film in the upcoming features for our local bijou and then the trailer, airing on Shudder during the intermission of "The Last...
Crimes of the Future
My kids primarily know David Cronenberg from an early "Rick and Morty", where Rick carelessly but typically turns the entire population of planet...
The Roundup
Ma Dong-seok! Ma Dong-seok! Thus goeth the chant on the way to Koreatown to see The Roundup, the latest Ma Dong-seok cop action flick. We like Mr....
Memoria
Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (say that name three times fast, or once slowly for that matter) has been showered with awards over his...
Hatching
For me, taking the Boy to go see a Finnish horror movie has a real "we're back!" feeling to it. (For purposes of this review, we'll set aside the...
Six Different Minds Working On Full Blast
Years ago, when we saw Violence Voyager, The Boy introduced me to a concept he had picked up on the Internet called "someone's different mind working...
Let It Be Morning (35th Israel Film Fest)
In what might be a metaphor, an allegory, perhaps a parable, when the self-proclaimed Palestinians make a movie by themselves, it's usually a horror...
Plan A (35th Israel Film Festival)
Did you know that there was a plan by angry Jews to poison the bread of SS being detained in American POW camps after WWII as revenge? It's true! The...
April 7, 1980 (35th Israel Film Fest)
We moved seamlessly from an actual documentary about Albert Speer into a dramatization of the events of April 7th, 1980, which is probably a very...
Speer Goes To Hollywood (35th Israel Film Fest)
Did you know a lot of Nazis have IMDB entries? Literal, classic Nazis, not these Ukrainians or Trump supporters I'm always hearing about. Like, Adolf...
The Duke
Well, here ya go! A nice little English movie with established actors and producers and what-not that does what nice little English films should do:...
Happy New Year/A Year End Medley
In the category of "movies you didn't know you needed", how about a Korean version of Love, Actually? Anyone? Anyone? @JulesLaLaLand? Confession...
Belle
It's not really rolling the dice to go see a Mamoru Hosoda film. Even if he's never quite hit the heights he did with the first film of his we saw...
Policeman's Lineage
Of the various genres we've experienced in Korean cinema, the crime dramas are often the hardest to follow. Since the plots tend to be deliberately...
The Northman
When Robert Eggers makes a movie, I presume two things: 1) That I'm going to like it; b) That I'm not going to recommend it to most people. This is a...
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
If you are a close reader (and who got time for that?) you may notice that I don't actually recommend movies very often, at least in any unqualified...
The 2022 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
Well, that just happened. The Boy is off on vacation and I'm trying to get back into the moviegoing habit, which ain't easy, because: a) arbitrary...
The Conversation (1974)
Sandwiched between the 1972 Best Picture Oscar-Winner Godfather and the 1974 Best Picture Oscar-Winner Godfather II, Francis Ford Coppola directed a...
Everything Everywhere All At Once
I've been a Michelle Yeoh fan going back to Supercop in the '90s. She and Maggie Cheung and the late Anita Mui were kind of the chop-socky version of...
The Quiet Man (1952)
I get tired of saying it—so this may even be the last time—but you can't help but notice that The Quiet Man is one of those classic Hollywood films...
Mystery Science Theater 3000: Santo in the Treasure of Dracula
And just as mysteriously as they arrived, the passport requirements vanished. I was actually able to go see a movie, sans mask, sans documents, with...
Christmas Ornaments 2: The Deckoning
It's Christmastime again, which of course means It's A Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street, "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and the Grinch, Die...
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
When I was a boy, the greatest of the secular holidays—if you'll forgive the oxymoron—was Thanksgiving. It sat defiantly on a Thursday and, fortified...
Rifftrax Live "Amityville: The Evil Escapes"
See, the thing is, The Amityville Horror had about one thing going for it: It was "based on a true story" during a glorious time when we still...
The Evil Dead (1981)
"The most ferociously original horror movie of 1982." — Stephen King That quote of Stephen King's could not have come earlier than June of 1982 when...
Old Henry
Pete: "I'm votin' for yours truly!" Everett: "Well, I'm votin' for yours truly, too!" [they look at Delmar] Delmar: "Okay. I'm with you fellers." The...
Scream (1996)
You know how you see an old movie—and I think we can call Scream an old movie, as this was the 25th anniversary showing—and you say, "They all look...
A Place Among The Dead
I remember when I first heard Juliet Landau announce she was working on a documentary about vampires. It was on Twitter and it was at least five...
Cry Macho
"It was awful!" I had asked The Boy what he thought about the new Clint Eastwood Cry Macho, and he said, "It was okay. What did you think?" I said,...
Prisoners of the Ghostland
Is it too soon to do another Nicolas Cage movie review? I swear that guy makes movies faster than most people can watch them. And this is going to...
Malignant
I sold the latest James Wan horror to The Boy by reading him part of Joe Bob Briggs' review ("4 stars! Check it out!") which emphasized the bat-guano...
Free Guy
It was that time of the year again again, as in last year was the first time Knott's Halloween Haunt was canceled in its history, and this year it...
Tango Shalom
A man in dire financial straits whose family has big problems to boot determines to save the day by a winning a competition. Sure we've seen it...
Night House
I realized, when watching this, that there is a distinct subgenre of horror film where the horror is a metaphor for depression. The Babadook and...
Cryptozoo
I thought we would go see Demonic, the Neil Blomkamp film, but the reviews are so bad on it that it seemed like a "watch the trainwreck" kind of...
Pig (2021)
Imagine, if you will, a kind of John Wick story where instead of being an assassin, he was a chef, and instead of his dog being killed, his truffle...
The Forever Purge
This is the first time I've ever taken a movie recommendation from Alex Jones who mentioned this movie during this interview with Michael Malice....
La Cercle Rouge (1970)
At some point, when you take yourself to your sixth '60s/'70s era French film with Alain Delon, you have only yourself to blame. Fortunately this was...
Chariots of Fire (1981)
If you had told me that forty years ago, the Academy Award for best picture went to a film about Man's relationship with his religion versus his duty...
The African Queen (1951)
The most depressing thing, for me, about seeing John Huston's classic film The African Queen was not coming out of the theater to see an add for...
The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
The worst thing is when I write a review of a movie which was bad or just okay or maybe just exactly what you'd expect, and then it somehow gets...
Cursed Official
The Boy has not really gotten back into the moviegoing swing of things, but it didn't take too much to talk him into seeing this one-night-only...
La Piscine (1969)
The Moviegique trope re French Films is simple. You describe the film until you get to the perverted sex part, or since a lot of them start with...
The Ladykillers (1955)
"Hey, you want to come see 'The Ladykillers' with me and The Boy?" . . . "It's got Alec Guinness in it! He played Obi Wan Kenobi, you know." . . ....
A Quiet Place II: Even Quieter
There was nothing, apart from box office, that suggested the 2018 survival horror A Quiet Place needed a sequel. Indeed, in the classic sci-fi/horror...
The Conjuring 3: The Devil Made Me Do It
In terms of percentage, the most profitable modern "universe" is probably not the MCU, but the, uh, Conjure-verse. Begun back in the halcyon days...
Final Account
Don't be a Nazi. If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times! No matter how beautiful, charmingly quirky, sexy, or kinky, they make it look,...
In The Earth
We're trying to get back to the movies, but even though we're very avid moviegoers, it's not like life actually stopped during the lockdown. Instead,...
Silents Are Golden (Part II): The Weird
In Silents Are Golden Part I (ace link, gique link that you can comment on without getting banned), we looked at some films in the talkie era that...
The Ten Commandments (Redux)
The Boy and I saw The Ten Commandments five years ago for the 60th anniversary and somehow it was fitting that our moviegoing should resume with the...
Silents Are Golden (Part I)
In his fascinating book, Who The Devil Made It?, Peter Bogdanovich interviews the greatest directors Hollywood ever produced and tries to figure out...
Westerns For The Fillies
Last time, NaturalFake brought up The Wind Rises and suggested a post on movies that present subjects from difficult POVs. For example, The Wind...
Two By Kim Ki Duk
The first Korean film I may have seen, as a wee nearly-29-year-old bairn, was Yongary, Monster from the Deep, the Korean Godzilla, if you like, which...
Christmas Ornaments
One of our evolving Christmas traditions had been to see a Korean movie on Christmas Eve. Since the Korean chain is closed forever, and since most of...
Freaky
Pickings, as noted, have been slim, though they were much fatter a few weeks ago before The Tyrant Newsom capriciously shut everything down again,...
Friendly Persuasion (1956)
Friendly Persuasion is a gem I discovered later in life, like Sweet Smell of Success, which it seemed to me belonged in the canon alongside of...
The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Old habits die hard and it wasn't too long after our first outing that we got the itchy feet to go out again! The only Korean film playing that we...
Steel Rain 2: Summit
This movie was an unexpected delight. I'm always a little leery of making a long trip for a Korean spy thrillers because the political stuff can be...
Okay Madam
In Our Oriental Heritage, volume one of Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization—the greatest set of books nobody ever reads—Durant points...
Train To Busan presents Peninsula
Ending the longest movie drought in 30 years, The Boy and I trucked out to Orange County, where cinemas are kinda sorta open to see a Korean...
Host
We were supposed to be opening up—well, hell, we were supposed to be opening up in April. (Remember that? in time for Easter!) But the latest "we...
The Book Wasn't Better
I just got through reading Fay Weldon's 1983 feminist "classic", The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, and it got me to thinking about revenge...
Reviewing The New Classics
As we've been shut out of the theater since King Kong, and as the strategy seems to be to lock everything up tight until it's completely destroyed,...
Meru
The Flower has been helping me straighten out my den, part of which includes (after the heavy lifting is done) going through hundreds of movie stubs....
King Kong (1933)
This would be our last movie...forever? I had not really believed a lockdown would go into place, and further thought that it would not last more...
Loving Vincent
This was the first movie I went to see with my newly minted (and now defunct) MoviePass, intrigued by the gimmick and positive reviews. The gimmick...
1945
Two Jews return to their erstwhile home after WWII, and the town is racked with suspicion and guilt: Who are they? Why are they there? Are they going...
2018 Year In Review
We saw over 120 films this year, which is easily our lowest year since 2010. I had about three weeks where I didn't see any movies—the longest...
The Whistlers
"Forget what I did in Bucharest. That was just for the security cameras." That bravura line, delivered by the very attractive Catrinel Marlon (as...
Beasts That Cling To The Straw
I thought the title of this Korean thriller was Beasts Clawing At Straws but sometimes these translations are a bit fuzzy. We ended up going to see...
The Man Standing Next
Back in the O.C. and avoiding seeing the Korean horror flick Closet because The Flower wanted to see that as well, I opted for this Korean thriller...
The Art of Allusion, or: I Get That Reference
I was enjoying an episode of "Mystery, Incorporated"—and believe me, I could do an extensive essay on how neatly "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" fits in...
Drink Entire: Against The Madness Of Crowds
(NOTE: You guys have asked in the past for links to the movie(s) referenced in a review. I put something together which I'll post in the comments.)...
Blumhouse's Fantasy Island
The original premise of '70s TV impresario Gene Levitt's "Fantasy Island" was something akin to "be careful what you wish for", and there was a...
Enter The Fat Dragon
It is not, I have noted, that all Korean and (particularly) Chinese movies are great. It is, however, true that they're capable of attaining...
Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words
"I was born...a poor black child." Of course, Thomas is way too dignified to have started his movie like that, but he really was born into abject...
Secret Zoo
Young lawyer-man has a chance to get out of his inferior internship and into a real position, and all he has to do is make a go of a client's newly...
Gretel and Hansel
Look, there's\re just not a lot of options for even bad movies that are at least somewhat interesting, and while the trailers for this film smacked...
The Turning
If I said that I didn't know what was going on in The Turn of the Screw, how would you know whether I was talking about the novella or the movie?...
Color Out Of Space
A strength of the written word over visual media is that it can convey abstractions that extend or even violate literal description. In a comically...
The Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts (2020)
Melancholy. I realized after watching: Cancer, death of a parent, dementia, abortion, dogfighting, deformity and death of a bird, that the...
An American In Paris (1951)
I'm singin' in the...Paris. Actually, Singin' In The Rain was the next year and would win zero Oscars, while this film would take home six including...
The Grudge (2020)
You could say I've got a grudge against The Grudge. I mean, you could say that but it wouldn't be accurate. I do have a slight history of it, as when...
Weathering With You
We memed ourselves, as the kids these days say, by going out to see this at the "special premiere" showing, because we didn't realize it was going to...
Ashfall
The Boy and I had tried to see this on Christmas Eve, but the subtitles hadn't been made yet. However, The Flower and I had a day trip to the OC for...
Forbidden Dream
This is one of those movies that makes me proud to be a Korean! I kid (sorta) but I would have to straight-up hate a country to not be able to...
Ip Man 4
I think, though I cannot swear, that I've seen one of the previous Ip Man movies, perhaps Ip Man 3 or Ip Man 2. I know that we saw The Grandmaster...
Uncut Gems
I don't exactly hate Adam Sandler, though I've seen few of his movies and the most recent ones, under duress. I sorta like the "Phone, Wallet, Keys"...
Richard Jewell
Although we admire Clint Eastwood and his apparent willingness to do whatever he wants (at 89 1/2 years old), and despite the hysterical...
The Two Popes
The Koreans had let us down. Our Christmas tradition (starting in 2016 with The Handmaiden) hit a roadbump when The Boy and jetted down to Koreatown...
No Safe Spaces
The Flower had wanted to see this documentary featuring Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager but as you might imagine it didn't have a lot of screens...
Citizen K
Here is a documentary about a Russian oligarch's trials and tribulations that was interesting on a lot of levels. The backstory is this: When...
White Snake
I was looking up information on Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm, as one does, and came across the pronouncement that White Snake Changes Chinese...
Jojo Rabbit
If you were young boy living in a militaristic society, and you weren't really very physically competent yourself but you had a lot of spirit, it...
Forgiveness
After the giddy fun of Tel Aviv on Fire and the dour moodiness of God of the Piano, we were only able to see one other Israeli film during the...
The Bicycle Thief (1948)
Not too long ago I went to see Breathless—oh, wow, almost ten years ago!—and at some point in the future I will probably end up seeing both Taxi...
God of the Piano
One of the funny things about independent or arty movies (or whatever you want to call those films which are made with a "selective appeal") is that...
The Godfather II (1974)
I've already done the bit about not liking the Godfather, but while I'd never seen that movie on the big screen before, I'm not entirely sure I...
Tel Aviv on Fire
I have, in the past, noted the irony that Chinese films seem a lot less censored than those from Hollywood, and today I will note the irony that...
The Addams Family (2019)
We laugh a bit, The Flower and I, over Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. She doesn't remember eschewing The Princess and the Frog to see it,...
The Tingler (1959)
Our host introduced this movie as "camp" but on watching it, I disagree. One of the charming things about low-budget movies from this era—the better...
Them! (1954)
"Them! Them! Them!" screams Sandy Descher and we are off to the races...and...well, The Boy was watching this and thinking, "You know if I didn't...
Parasite
One of my co-workers is Korean. Well, Korean-American. OK, he's an American but his parents are from Korea. He's the polar opposite of The Boy and I,...
Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future
I had an sci-fi coffee-table art book when I was a kid. It was photorealistic drawings of non-existing things, like flyings cities and whatnot. When...
Joker
I'm going to have to ramp up a whole bunch before actually getting to the actual review. I had zero interest in seeing Joker. Actually, I had less...
Zombieland: Double Tap
Well, it's been ten years and we've remade/sequelized everything else, let's do a sequel to [*rolls dice*throws darts*sacrifices chicken to Baal*]...
Alien (1979)
In space, no one can hear you scream. It was such a great tagline, for such a minimalist trailer, and so iconic that today it's almost impossible to...
An Accidental Studio
My favorite Beatle has always been George Harrsion, who was miscast as "the quiet one" in the PR for the band. After all, nearly anyone standing next...
Rambo: Last Blood
What if I told you the critics were upset about the latest "Rambo" movie? Would you think you had woken up in 1985? I mean, they always hated Rambo....
Double Indemnity (1944)
"No pigeons, I hope." "Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!" "Act casually..."...
Laura (1944)
One of my college profs was David Raksin. He got his start orchestrating and composing with Charlie Chaplin and hit it big with the theme from this...
How Rednecks Saved Hollywood
OK, I know I just covered Joe Bob's Last Drive-In Show which isn't even a movie, but when it turned out Joe Bob Briggs (government name John Bloom)...
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
I remember back in '96, the "Mystery Science Theater 3000" program had some bits about the upcoming Oscars, and Tom Servo said of this movie, "It's...
Along With Gods: The Two Worlds
We actually tailored our trip to the Halloween Haunt to make sure we had a chance to see this film. The Boy and I had seen it when it came out in...
The Bad Guys: Reign of Chaos
It was that time of year again: Halloween! Yeah, we basically celebrate it on the third or fourth Thursday of September, then kind of forget about it...
Freaks (2019)
A weird, intense man keeps his seven-year-old daughter locked away in their house while training her to act like a "normal" person because if she...
Ne Zha
Two, count 'em, two Chinese movies playing in Alhambra, and at the AMC which meant another month of squeezing value out of their $25/mo A-List...
Line Walker 2: The Invisible Spy
I had to coax, ever so slightly, The Boy into seeing this modern-day Shaw Brothers picture, but not much. The trailer looks like a dumb action flick....
The Matrix (1999)
I somehow got the marquee time for this wrong and we ended up a half-hour late for this 20th anniversary showing—which, with all the trailers and...
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Although The Boy had seen (and loved) this movie when it was aired for its 50th anniversary, this was The Flower's first viewing of the film and she...
The Divine Fury
An atheist MMA fighter develops stigmata and ends up punching demons for Jesus? How can you not love that premise? Well, I'll tell you how: You can...
The Battle: Roar to Victory
At one point, most of the Korean movies we had seen were about Japan invading, or about evil Japanese occupiers, etc. (Last year's The Great Battle...
Ready Or Not
Part of the problem with modern Hollywood fare is that, not only are the movies terrible—or at least terribly bland—the trailers are awful. You can't...
Rifftrax: The Giant Spider Invasion
It's probably difficult to imagine in our climate-hysterical modern days but the '70s had it all over us in the "nature gone amok" genre. In classic...
The King's Letters
The Koreans? They don't appreciate what they got, frankly. The Boy (and His Girl) and I had carted The Flower down to the OC for a day-long artistic...
EXIT
If The King's Letters was the sort of film that couldn't be made in America because patriotism is considered toxic, EXIT is the sort of film that...
A Job Who Is Near Us
And sometimes you end up feeling like an idiot. To wit, you see a movie title like "A Job Who Is Near Us" and you think, "Huh, some kind of pidgin-y...
The Wicker Man (1973)
Three or four years ago, I noticed that TCM was showing classics on the Big Screen. Then someone told me that the Regency theater right next to the...
The Other Story
It is harder to entice The Flower to the movies these days. She's got a lot going on (as young ladies will) and has opted for an early-to-bed,...
The Return of Martin Guerre (1982)
"That was very French—but in a good way!" So sayeth The Flower after we emerged from this classic French film about a man who returns from the war...
Annabelle Comes Home
I was stuck in the OC for a limited time and, with a couple of movies to burn (in order to try to get my $25/mo out of the AMC Stubs membership), I...
Crawl
One of the horde had mentioned this creature feature to me and I had the idea that I liked the director (Alexandre Aja, Horns) so I told The Boy I...
Violence Voyager
The Boy refused to say this was the greatest movie he'd ever seen. In fact, I'm not even sure that he said it was good—because, in any conventional...
Dead Man (1995)
This was the last of the Jarmusch flicks, and the apex of his budgets as well, possibly excluding the recent The Dead Don't Die. And I think it shows...
Mystery Train (1989)
The third in our Jarmusch-on-the-Loosh festival, this is the only genuine anthology, and makes more sense under its working title One Night In...
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Not to be confused with the 1956 film, Godzilla COMMA King of the Monsters, this is more of a remake of the 1964 film, Ghidorah, The Three-Headed...
Funan
We followed up our Korean action/procedural/thriller with this simply animated story of the Khmer Rouge and—have you ever noticed that there are no...
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil
Every now and again you get a Korean (but never Chinese) movie that's been ripped from the headlines! I assume the dedication to accuracy is about...
Down By Law (1986)
The second movie in our Jarmuschian journey was, in the end, the best The Boy and I both agreed. We would be a duo for all four of these films, but...
John Wick 3: Parabellum
If you'll recall, I had to go solo for the first John Wick movie, much to The Boy's later dismay. But it looked like...
Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
The theme for the month of June was Jim Jarmusch—Jarmusch is on the loosh! as we would come to say—as a build up to the disastrous new film The Dead...
Love Me Or Leave Me (1955)
As I've mentioned (probably too frequently), the '50s aren't really my time. I'm a pre-War guy, a lover of screwball comedies and proto-noir movies....
A Very Moral Night (1977)
We have pockets of slavs, which sounds sort of like an exotic fast food (Slav Pockets!) which is why we get oddball things like Russian flicks,...
Calamity Jane (1953)
I could hardly resist a Doris Day double-feature, even if the '50s are not my time, and even though this was not the film I was most intrigued to...
Shadow
Ahhhhh. I was tempering the children's expectations regarding this Zhang Yimou movie because it ranks well below House of Flying Daggers (on the...
The Sixth Sense (1999)
I have theorized over the years that M. Night Shyamalan's success was sort of accidental. It's an observation (and not an insult) that sometimes...
Domovoy
We have enough Russians in our neighborhood to occasionally warrant showing a contemporary Russian pop film, like the much enjoyed T-34 (protested as...
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Proving once again that Chinese filmmakers can pull a fast one on a par with any American studio, distribution and promotion for this Chinese art...
Savage
We were headed down to see the Chinese version of Long Day's Journey Into Night which, literally, you could not connect to the Eugene O'Neill on a...
True Grit (1969)
"Fill your hands you son of a bitch!" swears John Wayne iconically. He was against salty language in his movies, generally, but felt it was...
The Curse of La Llorona
You know, you get this AMC Stubs membership and you only have to find two shows a month to break even. The challenge, of course, is finding two...
The Crow (1994)
Any mention of this tragic 1994 Brandon Lee movie results in me going into my South-Park-Satan routine, "You guys...nobody dress up as The Crow..."...
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)
In my most recent look at It's A Wonderful Life, I referred to Gloria Grahame as "aggressively heterosexual", a statement I stand by. That said, I...
Pillow Talk (1959)
So here is a movie I've avoided for years, because by this point in Hollywood history, the romcom is getting increasingly licentious and overt, and...
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Not much to add to the last review. We saw it last about a year-and-a-half ago. The Boy and His Girl got to see it this time and liked it. This time,...
The Pink Panther (1963)
The second feature in our Clouseau double-feature was actually the first Clouseau movie, The Pink Panther. But the funny thing about that is that The...
A Shot In The Dark (1964)
We've had tremendous success with the classic double-features which our theater puts on once or twice a quarter, and when they announced the...
Ash Is Purest White
The thing about Asian movies (and foreign movies generally) is that appearing in an art house is not necessarily a sign of being an "art house"...
Spaceballs (1987)
I was prepared for the final "March Mel-ness" movie to be particularly unfunny—my sister claimed to have walked out of it at the time—and, honestly,...
The Wandering Earth
In the year 20whatever, the sun is going nova, and you know what that means! ROAD TRIP! No, seriously, remember when the earth was going to blow up,...
Young Frankenstein (1974)
For "March Mel-ness", we were offered four films. (Diane Keaton would end up getting five in May. Can I get a harrumph?) The Producers, which we had...
The Wedding Guest
From director Michael Winterbottom, the guy who brought you Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, The Trip, The Trip To Italy, and the TV series...
Joe Bob's Last Drive-In Show
I am not a television watcher, a fact that becomes increasingly obvious as I struggle even making it through one 20-hour series since February. But...
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1959)
According to Wikipedia, 1959 saw the popularization of the sword-and-sandal epic through a smash-hit Italian film distributed in America as Hercules,...
Alita: Battle Angel
My interest in seeing this film was less than zero and less than Less Than Zero—the grimy and unlikely screen version of Brett Easton Ellis' novel...
Blazing Saddles (1974)
I did not actually see this when it came out.* Because I was not actually Mel Brooks fan. Partly a prejudice inherited from my parents, but largely...
Pig
This was the movie we were going to see when the Russian Tank flick intervened and we ended up having to make a late show in Beverly Hills to get it....
To Dust
A Hasidic cantor with two sons loses his wife and becomes obsessed with her transition back "to dust". His obsession leads him to a community college...
T-34
We were hyped up to see this Iranian movie, Pig, but competing against it at the same time was a movie about Russian tank drivers in WWII. One...
My Fair Lady (1964)
I was a little surprised to discover that the running time for My Fair Lady was nearly three hours, and while that had no impact on my determination...
Mal-Mo-E: The Secret Mission
When The Boy and I walked out of the theater from this one, we had never been more proud to be Koreans. Which, of course, you know. But the point is,...
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
In a lot of ways, while the Brothers Warner haven't been able to cash in on the recent sweet, sweet superhero money, they have done a good job...
They Shall Not Grow Old
Since the passing of the pass of movie, The Boy and I have been AMC stubs/A-list/whatever-they-call-it members. Membership is $20/month and you can...
Stormy Weather (1943)
It's black history month and that means—well, probably that we're not going to be super interested in the throwbacks. Next year, I'll see if I can't...
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The new office puts The Boy and I within striking distance of some of the usually hard-to-get-to theaters, and this created the felicitous...
Your Name Is Rose (Rosebud)
This one had a lot of different titles. It showed up as Rosebud at the theater but I think I saw it as "My Name is Rose" and "Her Name is Rose". When...
Extreme Job
A down-and-out bunch of cops sets up a stakeout in a restaurant across the street from a drug-lord's HQ, only to find the restaurant is shutting...
Groundhog Day (1993)
"Okay, campers, rise and shine and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cold out there today!" "It's cold out there every day. What is this, Miami...
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
I bought tickets for this TCM-sponsored screening of The Wizard of Oz on the Thursday before the Sunday showing, and only the front row was open. It...
The Thing (1982)
I have a theory that nobody really wants effective horror movies. Or effective horror anything, really, because to be horrified is to be repulsed, to...
Venom
Of all the children, the Barbarienne is the most susceptible to Internet memes and just plain-old advertising, which makes her an oddity around here,...
Cliffhanger (1993)
I have a new favorite Renny Harlin movie! OK, I have a favorite Renny Harlin movie, where before I wouldn't take free tickets to anything with his...
Roma
A middle-class Mexican family in 1970-1971 undergoes a lot of changes amidst the riots and earthquake, as seen from the perspective of their Indian...
Mandy
Finally! A movie based on Barry Manilow's 1975 #1 monster pop hit "Mandy"! You probably remember these classic lyrics: Oh, Mandy! They came and they...
Fargo (1996)
Fargo has come up a lot on this blog over the years, serving as a kind of touchstone for regional movies about the midwest (like Thin Ice and Frozen...
The Mule
One could uncharitably observe that Clint Eastwood's latest movie has high-60s scores on RT—the cinematic equivalent of a "golf clap"—but as I like...
Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
What if Spider-Man were a migraine? I think it would look a little bit like this movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I should dial this back a...
Default
Now in it's not-quite-consecutive third year, our tradition of going to see a Korean movie on Christmas Eve (Day) took us to Koreatown and Default,...
Anna and the Apocalypse
What do you get if you cross High School Musical with Shaun of the Dead? Well, I can't say for sure, because I never saw HSM, but I suspect it'd...
Capernaum
I did warn the kids when Trump got elected that we were in store for a lot of bad movies, and that a lot of movies that might be good will torpedo...
Airport (1970)
Disaster month closed out with the granddaddy of the genre, Airport. It broke the $100M mark—a rarity for the time, and what used to constitute a...
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
Even if you hate Frank Capra's post-war flop about a man who finds value in his life by seeing it undone, it can be startling how starkly it reveals...
The Favourite
"I thought the ladies could take me to see The Favourite for my birthday." "..." "Then I realized—" "YORGOS LANTHIMOS!" "—the guy who did The...
Gremlins (1984)
I have long felt that the script to Gremlins is possibly the dumbest ever developed into a major motion picture, even dumber than the other scripts...
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Of all the disaster movies, The Poseidon Adventure is one of them. "Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat..." It's probably my favorite. I never saw a need to...
Schindler's List (1993)
I did not see the movie that ruined Steven Spielberg when it came out, as shocking as that may come to you, my loyal reader. I was lucky to get out...
The Sound Story
Do not ask the boy his opinion unless you really want it. A rule to live by, the relevance of which I will reveal shortly. "WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU!"...
Earthquake (1974)
Well, our lovely throwback hostess, April, has been working on it for the better part of 2018, and finally managed to convince the head office to...
Elf (2003)
I approach revisiting most of the comedies made in my lifetime with a degree of trepidation. Much like horror movies, comedies tend to lean on...
Shoplifters
Hirokazu Koreeda, which is a name I must type quickly before I forget how to spell it, has directed three previous movies that made it to our local...
Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010)
The end of the video-game-themed throwbacks at the local bijou was Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which we hadn't seen at the time for...
MST3K Live! The 30th Anniversary Tour: The Brain
If it's true, as I maintain, that movies are better at the cinema, it's also true that shows are better live, for all the same reasons augmented by...
Shoah: The Four Sisters
Here's something to be thankful for this weekend: You're not a Jew in Europe in WWII. When we last heard from the late Claude Lanzmann, it was for...
Overlord
One of the parenting tricks I use on going to a movie with a child is to solicit said child's opinion of the film first, and not offer my own at all...
Die Hard (1988)
"Now I have a machine gun. Ho. Ho. Ho." Although it's only been about two years since we last saw Die Hard, The Flower opined upon leaving the first...
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)
The annual Halloween double-feature tradition this year was a showing of The Invisible Man and this movie, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein....
WarGames (1983)
The Flower bowed out of this one and we're probably all be taking a pass on next week's showing of Tron, but while I liked WarGames at the time, I've...
Rifftrax: Krull
If had little to say about Space Mutiny, I probably have even less to say about Krull, the 1983 "classic" fantasy picture that allegedly escaped...
Dark Figure of Crime
After Rampant, we checked the time for the (now working) crime drama, Dark Figure of Crime and we had just enough time to catch it (after a very...
Rampant
We were once again off to Koreatown, as The Boy truly loves him some Korean films, and was indeed disappointed that there were only two features on...
Rifftrax: Space Mutiny
The fourth and final ticket stub for 2018 the Flower and I came across—so far—was for Rifftrax: Space Mutiny, the first of (only two!) Rifftrax live...
Insidious: The Last Key
Update: I wrote this because it looked to me like I hadn't reviewed it when I first saw it, and I came across the ticket stub. (Funny because I was...
The Invisible Man (1933)
James Whale is the most feted of the monster movie directors, even getting a movie about his life (or the end of it) with the Oscar-winning Gods and...
Lady Bird
The second stub we came across was from early in the year, when we were still seeing the Oscar detritus, and The Boy and I had put this in our "Well,...
The 15:17 To Paris
Inevitably, I miss a few reviews. Actually, I think I miss more than a few if my recent dig through movie stubs (and the history feature of late,...
Gosnell: America's Biggest Serial Killer
Back in early 2014, Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer found their attempts to crowdfund for their movie about Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia...
Dead Snow (2009)
The last of our "Scary Subtitles" series for the year, this little Norwegian flick about "Nazi Zombies" made a bit of a stir when it came out 9 (!)...
Friday the 13th (1980)
"That was...a trashy movie, wasn't it, dad?" Pictured: Not Betsy Palmer's hand. I had told the kids that the original Sean S. Cunningham-directed...
I Saw The Devil (2010, Korea)
Korean revenge pictures, I warned The Flower, are not like American ones. They are not meant to be cathartic action films where you identify strongly...
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939)
This TCM presentation marked the beginning of a strange week of moviegoing. The Flower was incredibly excited to see Frank Capra's classic Mr. Smith...
Black Sabbath (1963)
I was fairly cool on this early Mario Bava entry in our "Not Scared of Subtitles" Halloween month—which still beats the tar out of Rocktober, which...
Beetlejuice (1988)
It's easy—really easy at this point—to forget how brilliant Tim Burton was once upon a time. And, at the time, it was kind of easy to take him for...
Teen Titans Go! To The Movies
The Barbarienne's movie tastes are decidedly more conventional than either of her siblings, which may be due to her immersion in YouTube culture—she...
The Devil's Backbone (2001)
October marked the beginning of the delightfully pretentious Laemmle's "Scary Subtitles" month. (I like to think I'm delightfully pretentious, too,...
The Negotiation
The big problem with seeing three movies in a row, if you've never done it, is that typically the third movie has to overcome the fact that you've...
The Shining (1980)
I was a little surprised when The Flower said she wanted to see The Shining again, not because it's not a great movie but it seemed like it wasn't...
Fengshui
I had a kind of uncanny feeling watching this Korean historical drama about a noble geomancer who is betrayed by his corrupt peers who mis-advise the...
The Great Battle
The Boy and I were immediately drawn to this film of heroism, which turned out to be a first for us: Instead of Japan invading Korea, it was China...
The Spy Gone North (2018, Korea)
It is a tradition, over the past few years, for us to head down to Buena Park early on the eve we go to Knott's Halloween Haunt so that we can get...
The Lady Eve (1941)
I confess that I don't really think of Barbara Stanwyck as a "great beauty" (and the wig in Double Indemnity does her no favors), but she was without...
The Sound of Music (1965)
The sound of music! The hills are alive with it, apparently! Wow, talk about a cold open, to have sweeping panoramic vistas from an airplane (or...
Devil in a Blue Dress (1995)
Denzel Washington is one of those actors I really like but seldom see in movies. Tell a lie—I actually have seen him in at least five movies in the...
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
It was Screwball Comedy month at the local bijou, and once again, they started out strong with Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby, followed the next week...
Avengers: Infinity War
"That was really good!" Five minutes later as we're pulling out of the parking lot: "That was really stupid!" I am evil Ho-MER! I am evil Ho-MER! And...
Death of a Nation
You know, I honestly don't know what Dinesh D'Souza is up to, really. We saw his first movie, America: Imagine A World Without Her, and 2016: Obama's...
South Pacific (1958)
Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger. You may wash him out of your hair shortly thereafter, if you are carefully taught. That is the...
Charade (1963)
The second movie in our Cary Grant double-feature was Charade, and I realized when I saw it that it represented an entry in an entire subgenre of...
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948)
In a now classic bit from the long-overdue-for-death TV series, "Family Guy", the family is drowning and the father (Peter) makes a shocking,...
Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings
After the highly entertaining antics of our afterlife bureaucrats in Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days, The Boy and I left the Flower to her...
Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days
In the best, or possibly worst, tradition of blockbusters, Along with the Gods: The Last 49 Days was filmed simultaneously with its prequel, Along...
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)
I had long been under the impression that George Lazenby was given a kind of raw deal when he first became James Bond, having to follow Sean Connery....
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)
The second feature on our Monroe double bill—and the second smash hit for Marilyn in 1953, was the iconic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. In fact, prior to...
Goldfinger (1964)
One of the problems with the Laemmle's theme months is that they often open with a classic. Like "Military May" began with The Dirty Dozen and of...
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
While I am not a fan of "you ruined my childhood!" as a lamentation, it is possible to ruin something retroactively. With Avatar, for example, James...
The Cakemaker
It had been a while since we'd seen an Israeli film, which was our staple before we switched to classics and Asian cinema, and this film The...
Three Identical Strangers
Probably the most horrifying thing about the Nazis is the fact that, no matter how much some try to cover it up, the philosophy itself (or some...
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
I was never a fan of "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood" (though now more than ever I appreciate the proper use of the possessive apostrophe), a sleepy little...
Glory (1989)
I am not a fan of the Civil War, which I actually found kind of boring, though it was kind of fun to hear The Boy swear for months every time he did...
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Dark night...it's a daaaaark night! Say what you will about the oeuvre of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino—and I got a lot to say about (and...
Animal World
The Boy and I have for years relied on our local independent theater for movie options when Hollywood has failed us, which was usual enough that said...
The Accidental Detective 2: In Action
After seeing the smash hit Chinese comedy, Detective Chinatown 2, it was amusing to come across this Korean sequel to Accidental Detective—which we...
Lobster Cop
I mean. The title. The title alone virtually guarantees you gotta go see this film. I mean, is he a cop who's a lobster or is he a cop with...
How To Marry A Millionaire (1953)
I documented a few months back how The Flower and I were not really Marilyn Monroe fans. We didn't get it, as they say. Some Like It Hot made...
Hereditary
We were, once again, without a second feature to see in Koreatown, so we trundled over to the Fairfax district and had our first experience in The...
Believer (2018, Korea)
Korean crime dramas are interesting. In a lot of ways, Believer reminds me of a Martin Scorsese film, as our hero cop chases a drug kingpin no one...
Touch of Evil (1958)
In one of my favorite moments of one of my favorite films (Ed Wood), Orson Welles (played by Vincent D'Onofrio but voiced by Maurice LaMarche)...
The Incredibles 2
It is hard to over-estimate how greatly Pixar has fallen at The House of Gique. We view them as having produced the longest streak of perfect (or...
Airplane! (1979)
Following the modest-but-unexpected success of their sketch-based comedy film Kentucky Fried Movie, Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker tied...
Saving Brinton
My follow-up to the dismal 2036 was such a delightful love song to small-town America, it completely erased any negative feelings from the previous...
2036 Origin Unknown
Sometimes, of course, you know. You can tell just from looking at the (typically scant) promotional material. The paucity of IMDB information. The...
The Wild Bunch (1969)
Sam Peckinpah's magnum opus didn't bowl me over when I saw it for the first time in a theater (with the old man, actually, as part of a western...
The Producers (1968)
I'm not really a Mel Brooks fan, and while I loved Gene Wilder, I was never a fan of shouty-humor. THINGS ARE NOT FUNNY JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE SHOUTING!...
Three Kings (1999)
When I saw this originally, I remembered being impressed that George Clooney had ditched the head tilt finally started acting. I also thought it was...
Batman (1989)
The Flower puts a certain amount of weight on my cinematic opinions in gauging whether or not to go to a movie. Also, sometimes she gets really,...
How Long Will I Love U
It's an oddity that The Boy and I will see 120 to 150 movies (or more!) a year and yet only half of those will be in the top 40. The percentage goes...
A Quiet Place
This is one of those movies that suffers from the hype, though it wasn't as intense as the ridiculously over-hyped Get Out, which has a similar...
Death Wish (2018)
I have never been a fan of the '66-'75 era of cinema generally, and especially not of the style of violent cop/revenge action pictures—although Dirty...
Stripes (1981)
At some point, I'm sure I mentioned this movie...well, somewhere online. But when they say "The Internet is forever" what they really mean is that...
Champion
You were probably wondering how, given the fact that the Sylvester Stallone arm-wrestling vehicle finished a mighty 68 at the 1987 box office...
A or B
The Flower has exploited The Boy's and my enthusiasm for Asian pictures, and also expanded her circle of friends, requiring more and more trips to...
Annihilation
So, here we have a sci-fi film with horror overtones getting generally good notices from critics and lukewarm reception from audiences, and this just...
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Sunset booooulevard, twisty booooulevard! The first thing I had to break to the kids on this one is that Sunset Boulevard is not a musical. (And this...
Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum
"Blair Witch, eh? Hold my soju!" This was by far the most conventional of movies we've seen in the Korean—and by "conventional", I mean in the...
Stand By Me (2018, Korea)
Here's a movie with a simple, not very informative title (Stand By Me) and production values comparable to a TV movie, along with a sort of...
Weird Science (1985)
Well, nobody was more surprised than I when The Flower said she wanted to see this one again. I was barely on board six months ago about taking them...
Be With You
Right here. This, this sort of movie, this is the reason we go see Asian films. They show them on the wall of this little tunnel. Be With You is a...
Seven Years of Night
There are a lot of distinctive differences between Asian and American films, which is generally why we like them. Some of the differences are just...
Easter Parade (1948)
The second feature in our Astaire double-feature was the classic Irving Berlin/Fred Astaire/Judy Garland musical Easter Parade. Fred Astaire had...
The Band Wagon (1953)
When they announced the Fred Astaire double-feature, I was instantly sold because of Easter Parade, not really having any idea what The Band Wagon...
Isle of Dogs
In a first ever for us, we followed up our month of "themed" movies by seeing the new Wes Anderson flick Isle of Dogs. (Mr. Paul Thomas Anderson did...
Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
By this point, we were psyched for anything Wes Anderson had to offer, including his new film, Isle of Dogs, and this one, Fantastic Mr. Fox, which I...
Detective Chinatown 2
The second feature of our not-Chinatown double-feature was, by contrast to the low-budget, low-key Shed Skin Papa, a big-budget smash hit in the top...
Shed Skin Papa
While we have been struggling to find any contemporary English-language movies worth watching, our problem this particular sunny Saturday was...
The Darjeeling Limited (2007)
The "middle period" of Wes Anderson's career, which I sort of regard as starting after The Royal Tenenbaums contains my least favorite of his films:...
The Princess and the Matchmaker
The second film in our Korean double-feature (after Little Forest) was another great example of why we're favoring the orient these days: The...
Little Forest
As part of our continuing adventures in Koreatown (and real Chinatown, which is actually Monterey Park), the Boy and I set off to see another (we...
Bottle Rocket (1996)
And what if, you may wonder, Wes Anderson directed a heist movie. We were actually discussing this, I believe in the context of the awful looking...
Wonder
I had to go see this one alone. Which is understandable, I guess, because it looks like it could be so very bad. But the RTs were strong for both...
The King of Hearts (1966)
In the closing days of World War I, retreating German forces set up a massive bomb in the center of a small French village, hoping to delay and...
Foxtrot
This is one of those polarizing movies which would be entirely unremarkable and uncontroversial if made in America, but Israel still has some elites...
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
It was probably the whiff of family dysfunction that put me off The Royal Tenenbaums when it first came out. It is not at all that I can't enjoy a...
2018 Oscar Nominated Animated Short Films
The Flower wasn't particularly interested in the seeing the animated short nominations this year, and I can't really say that I blamed her given the...
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The problem with a romantic movie that stars Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, The Flower mused, is that you don't know who's going to get the girl! And...
Early Man
Aardman movies do not do well here in the USA, as I've noted on previous titles. Each film makes less than the last, with Chicken Run actually being...
Rushmore (1998)
The theme of the month at the local bijou is "Wes is More": I think, capitalizing on the phenomenal success of the Paul Thomas Anderson month—every...
Fantastic Planet (1973)
This weird little French animation was a common sight on the "Pay TV" channels (back in the day when "Pay TV" had a specific meaning both...
Till the End of the World
An arrogant businessman demands his charter flight to Antarctica take off as scheduled, despite inclement weather, resulting in the plane crashing...
A Better Tomorrow 2018
The thing about the Koreans and the Hong Kong guys is that they apparently didn't get the message about what movies are supposed to be about in this...
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Yes, I have created a monster. Yes, The Big Lebowski played again as part of "Marijuana Awareness Month," which I'm told is both "real" and a...
Keys to the Heart
Our second feature in our Korean outing was the shockingly good tear-jerker Keys to the Heart. My only disclaimer on this is that our lives with The...
1987: When The Day Comes
It was Korean double-feature time—which comes when The Flower wants to visit her friends near Koreatown and the theater is playing two Korean movies...
Wayne's World (1992)
"Wayne's World! Wayne's World! Party time! Excellent!" "Party on, Wayne." "Party on, Garth." I don't think I ever actually saw the "Saturday Night"...
Magnolia (1999)
You know, I would say I like Paul Thomas Anderson as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure that's true, given that every film we saw of his after...
Django
I didn't really know anything about Django Reinhardt going into this film, other than I liked the way he played guitar. Having seen the movie Django,...
The Darkest Hour
We were cool on seeing this highly acclaimed film as we tend to be cool on seeing any/all of the highly acclaimed films that Hollywood regurgitates...
Hard Eight (1996)
We had been turned away from Boogie Nights and didn't bother to go to There Will Be Blood—which they played in two theaters and filled almost all of...
TCM Big Screen Classics: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
"Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" is probably one of the great misquotes in...
Insidious: The Last Key
After the first installation in the series, sequels to Insidious have been generally poorly received, if one is to believe the Tomatometer. The first...
Rhinoceros (1974)
Imagine, if you will, Night of the Living Dead but with rhinoceroses. That would be a pretty good summary of Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, if you...
Coco
It was, to say the least, challenging to get The Flower to see the latest "Pixar" movie (scare quotes explained in a bit). Cars 2 was really quite a...
Heart Blackened
Once again I find myself wandering Koreatown, begging for kimchi, and what should I come upon but a Korean double-feature! Well, not really, it's...
The Florida Project
We had been trying—and failing!—to get into the L.A. Israel Film Festival for days, only to find it being sold out again-and-again. This stings...
My Life As A Dog (1987)
Swedish director Lasse Hallestrom's career path has taken him from directing ABBA videos through an odd, but not quite "indie" path of movies...
Text-only
Thor: Ragnarok
While we weary of superhero films, a good movie is a good movie, and with much trepidation we went off to see Taika Waititi's latest film, Thor:...
Murder By Death (1976)
The Flower has a new favorite movie. It was challenging enough to explain when it was Gran Torino but now the conversations tend to go like this:...
The Long Goodbye (1973)
Of the November detective movies, I was the coolest on this Robert Altman film, The Long Goodbye. I tend to be about 50-50 on Altman, finding him...
The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936)
If nothing else, venturing out to see a French movie allows us all to sing a beloved song (from "The Critic"): We like French films Pretentious...
Cat People (1942)
See these eyes so green? I can stare for a thousand years. Colder than the moon. It's been so long. As David Bowie sang. But that was for the remake...
The Mummy (1932)
Swan Lake, Op. 20 by Tchaikovsky. It was used in Dracula (and Drácula) and also Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), but nowhere is it used as...
A Special Lady
Last time I went to Koreatown while The Flower hung out with her friends, I managed to get there just in time to score a double-feature: A Special...
The Maltese Falcon (1942)
<span style="font-size: 1.5em;">The Flower didn't even hesitate.</span> Of course we were going to see it again. It's still great. This was actually...
Let The Right One In (2008)
This is a first for the site, I believe: I took the kids to see a "throwback" movie for a movie The Boy and I had already seen and I had blogged...
Rifftrax: Night of the Living Dead
We didn't get on the "live" Rifftrax performances right away so it's nice that they occasionally re-show them in theaters. I trust my opinion about...
The Fly (1958)
"Be afraid. Be very afraid." That line is actually not from the 1958 version of The Fly but the 1986 remake, itself iconic in its own unique way....
Trollhunter (2010)
"TROOOOLLLL!" It is at this point in André Øvredal Trollhunter that it seriously begins distinguish itself from its inspiration, The Blair Witch...
Bocaccio '70 (1962)
The thing about The Boy is if you tell him there's a 3 1/2 hour Italian anthology movie from the degenerate '70s which is probably full of surrealism...
Ghostbusters (1984)
I am one of those people—yes, one of those people, as we say when reciting Ed Begley's wonderfully non-specific bigoted rant from 12 Angry Men—who...
The Host (2006)
From the fevered mind of Joon-Ho Bong, the maniac who brought you Snowpiercer, comes an almost equally batty creature feature about a...
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
I was tied up handling The Enigma, so I didn't get out to see this one. The Flower (who had watched the whole Cornetto trilogy on her birthday last...
Timecrimes (2007)
The first in the subtitled horror movies (and followed in subsequent weeks with The Host, Trollhunter and Let The Right One In), this was a neat...
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
"What we have here is a failure to communicate." A local deli has this pic blown up and huge on the wall. Not sure what they're trying to say. This...
Sweet Bird of Youth (1962)
It's time for a Paul Newman double feature, apparently, and this was the first film. Not one I'd ever heard of but directed by Richard Brooks, who I...
Memoir of a Murderer
I have, of late, become much less sensitive to crowds and noise, which is a real boon given the way the neighborhood's been changing over the past...
Kindergarten Cop (1990)
Reading, writing, 'rithmetic! (Reading writing 'rithmetic) Too much homework makes me sick (Too much homework makes me sick!) When it's time to pass...
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
This is more of a bookmark: I didn't actually get to see this. We trundled off to the theater to catch this "first" Ghibli film, which (deep breath)...
Kong: Skull Island
I dragged The Boy along to see this one. (The Barbarienne was an enthusiastic accomplice to my kaiju venture.) I never really got into the giant...
Baby Driver
One of the lines used in Edgar Wright's new action/crime flick is lifted (credited) from Fight Club: "How's that working out for you?" When TV's Andy...
The Hitman's Bodyguard
I'm not sure at what point I realized this, but The Hitman's Bodyguard is essentially a modern take on the '80s odd-couple/buddy-cop action genre....
Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
We missed the Schwarz-tember (still sounds more Jewish to me than Austrian) showing of The Running Man in order to catch Lupin III: The Castle of...
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
We have been, as noted elsewhere, pretty burnt out on this whole superhero thing. We don't even want to go see good superhero movies, particularly....
Grave of the Fireflies (1988)
Of course, the only correct reaction after seeing this Isao Takahati/Studio Ghibli film, possibly the saddest movie ever made is: "And that's what...
Rifftrax Live: Summer Shorts Beach Party
I sometimes forget to review things and it doesn't turn up until I go to link to those things later on. In this case, I was looking for this "Summer...
Predator (1987)
"GET TO DA CHOPPAH!" There are literally NO pictures on the Internet of the moment where Schwarzenegger says "Get to da choppa!" that don't have the...
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Bum-BUM-buum... BUM-BUM! I said in my review of Raiders of the Lost Ark that Lucas & Spielberg owed a lot to Harrison Ford, but they also owe a lot...
Wind River
It's kind of like a millennial Thunderheart, I guess. Remember that one? Val Kilmer was still a respected actor playing a half-Indian—he may even...
Knightriders (1981)
The classics theme for August was "hog wild" and featured a lot of motorcycle movies made between those most awesome of years 1965-1975. I didn't...
Dunkirk
I knew this Christopher Nolan picture would be technically excellent and, also, I knew I would be pretty "meh" about it. So, yeah, expectations met....
The Sandlot (1993)
"You're killing me, Smalls!" That line is why I had to see this 1993 movie I had (deliberately) overlooked back in 1993. Critics were disapproving...
In This Corner Of The World
And that's what you get for bombing Pearl Harbor! Representative of the mighty Imperial Navy, now at the bottom of the ocean floor. I kid the...
Rifftrax: The Five Doctors (1983)
The last new Rifftrax Live of the year turned out to be a skewering of an early-model-fan-service "Dr. Who" special called "The Five Doctors". The...
Annabelle: Creation
We've had mixed luck, at best, with the whole "Oh, traffic is so bad, let's stay and watch a movie instead" approach. And "mixed" is probably being...
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I didn't expect to like this movie, this poster child for that era of filmmaking where the "director was the auteur" that the critics love so well,...
Weird Science (1985)
I didn't sell the kids on this one. So far, I've steered them away from the Hughes oeuvre, not because I think his movies were awful, but because I...
Cape Fear (1962)
We followed up the Mitchum noir Out of the Past with the J. Lee Thompson thriller Cape Fear, which was famously remade into hash by Martin Scorsese....
Out of the Past (1947)
To my generation, to the extent we knew of Robert Mitchum at all, it was as a doughy, baggy-eyed, sleepy-looking dude who showed up in the occasional...
Vertigo (1958)
The problem with giving kids information and letting them come to their own conclusions, of course, is that they often come to the wrong damn...
To Die For (1995)
You know, I missed this when it came out but I always sort of regretted it. At the same time, I had come to suspect that it was not, in fact, very...
The Beguiled (2017)
This is one of those movies that has a controversy attached, which is so completely irrelevant to, well, just about anything, that you almost wonder...
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Yeah, it played again. Yeah, we saw it again. Yeah, we laughed our asses off, like we had never seen it before. What more can I say? It was The...
Double Indemnity (1944)
When Fred MacMurray first meets Barbara Stanwyck, she's been sunbathing on the roof (possibly even in THE NUDE) and Fred says, "No pigeons around, I...
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Duh-duh-DUH-duh! Duh-duh-duuuuuuh! Duh-duh-duh-DUH! Duh-duh-DUH! DUH! DUH! Duh-duh-DUH-duh! Duh-duh-duuuuuuh!...
Dressed To Kill (1980)
I'm gonna just spoil this one right off the bat so if you haven't seen it, give this review a miss. Because, by far, the best part of this movie was...
The Music Man (1962)
And sometimes: Exhilaration. I love this movie. I love this musical. When the dorky animated credits start with the whistle blowing and the little...
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)
Our Independence Day was a musical extravaganza with Yankee Doodle Dandy on a double-bill with The Music Man and, boy-oh-boy, that's a lot of music....
Warriors of the Dawn
The Flower has friends downtown and, the way traffic is in the city, it takes an hour to make the trip. They often only hang out for a few hours at a...
Cabaret (1972)
I did a paper in college about how Cabaret was basically the death knell of the traditional musical and, these days, I probably couldn't back that up...
It Comes At Night
Yes! It comes at night! What comes at night? you ask? Beats me. Still don't know after seeing this. Unless...what comes at night is fear, paranoia,...
Rocky (1976)
I've mentioned (repeatedly) about movies that were part of my youth, and the reticence with which I sometimes recommend them to my children, and...
Some Like It Hot (1959)
And some like it sweet. Hard to believe, perhaps, but I had never seen this movie. (Perhaps less hard to believe: I didn't get that it was a...
The Godfather (1972)
One of my favorite bits of TV, which goes back far enough that you get the sense of how little TV I watch these days, is from a fairly hacky 2006...
Frenzy (1972)
It's all very well to talk about "lesser Hitchcock" but, once again, even "lesser Hitchcock" is still pretty damn good, and the kids ended up really...
Saboteur (1942)
We've had just tremendous luck with the anniversary double-features at our family-owned chain. It kicked off with 12 Angry Men and Witness for the...
Past Life
Not long after seeing the underwhelming zoo-based Holocaust movie, The Boy and I trundled off to see this Israeli movie about a couple of sisters in...
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Ben Mankiewicz claimed in the buildup to this that he preferred it to Star Wars which...well, I can relate, I guess. It's not boring (like the early...
Stalker (1979)
And sometimes ya gotta see a three hour Soviet-era metaphysical Russian movie with lots of long, slow tracking shots, huge sequences without...
Hair (1979)
This would be the sixth film in our five-film greatest-of-all-time series but I suppose I've spoiled it but pointing out that there were only five...
The Zookeeper's Wife
The problem, The Boy and I mused after seeing this tale of a Polish zookeeper during WWII, is that if you're going to do a Holocaust story, you've...
Robocop (1987)
As I've noted previously, I often have mixed feelings about the movies of my youth. One of the great surprises of the past year-and-a-half has been...
West Side Story (1961)
When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way. From your first cigarette, to your last dying day. Which, y'know, given what early smokin' will do to a...
Casablanca (1942)
This was our fourth film in the series that would come to be known as the "we've seen all the good movies" streak and it's hard to argue with this...
Ghostbusters (Extended Cut, 2016)
I'm making an exception for this movie: I did not go see it in the theater (like everyone else) and I had a strongly negative inclination to see it...
Get Out
It took a lot of effort—a lot—to get The Boy to this critically acclaimed horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele (of the very funny "Key...
Guys and Dolls (1955)
Guys and dolls! They're just a bunch of screwy guys and dolls! Pictured: Guy, doll, guy, doll. The Flower was surprised to discover that that song...
Witness For The Prosecution (1957)
Billy Wilder is one of those directors who have largely escaped my attention, perhaps because his last movie—the one release of his I saw in the...
12 Angry Men (1957)
Try this on for size: While 12 Angry Men is one of the greatest films ever made, if you think it's socially important, you should feel exactly the...
American Graffiti (1973)
For a variety of reasons which I shan't belabor (or rather, belabor even more than I already have, which is a lot), many of the Baby Boomers'...
All About Eve (1950)
I say, with not a hint of sarcasm, that every time I see All About Eve, I think "That Eve seems nice. A little intense, but nice." And then, of...
The Graduate (1967)
Some movies I end up seeing just because they're "classics". I suspect I'm not going to like them and—well, in fairness, I have been surprised more...
Your Name
The kids are into the Japanimation, as kids these days are, but even so, we had no information on this film, Your Name, and no strong inclination to...
Field of Dreams (1989)
After the previous outing, the "Randy Newman film" The Natural, the kids were a lot more amenable to baseball movies, generally, and I particularly...
Rifftrax: Samurai Cop (1991)
He's the musclebound cop In the lady's wig And the bad-fitting baseball cap See him drive around the city Running over bad guys In his Chevrolet...
The Natural (1984)
It was hard to get the kids interested in the baseball movie month at the local Bijou, and I wasn't really up to pushing The Bad News Bears very hard...
Now, Voyager (1942)
After Marked Woman, the next feature was the one I really wanted to see: Now, Voyager. (I didn't really have any idea what it was about, so perhaps...
Marked Woman (1937)
The Flower has become especially enamored of the old films, the noir, and—let us be frank—the sartorial stylings of the pre-'60s era. As such, she's...
Life of Brian (1979)
As you may recall, I get nervous sometimes when taking the kids to a movie that was really big in my life. You just never know how well something...
The Red Turtle
It's probably fair to say this is a French film, with its original title being La tortue rouge, but Studio Ghbili co-founder Isao Takahata (Only...
Moana
I'm at the point—perhaps because I'm just that jaded, or maybe, just maybe, it's something else—where a review of a kiddie movie is just the hardest...
After The Storm
Hirokazu Koreeda, the Japanese director who won our hearts with such films as Like Father, Like Son and Our Little Sister is back with a new look at...
Bullitt (1968)
Some say director Peter Yates will be best remembered for his sword and sorcery epic Krull, others insist it will be introducing the world to a young...
Love & Taxes
And speaking of different, how about a movie about a red-diaper baby whose life comes a cropper when, in middle-age, he confesses to his tax-lawyer...
The Lure
If you see only one Polish horror/comedy/musical about mermaids this year make it The Lure! How's that for a quote you can put on a movie poster?...
The Women's Balcony
Although I joke about it sometimes because of the (relatively) few number of foreign films we see, it is undoubtedly true that a nation's films...
The Lego Batman Movie
The Lego Batman Movie is a necessary film, after a fashion. Necessary because, after Burton, Nolan and (God help us) Snyder, Batman movies have...
Dirty Harry (1971)
I know what you're thinking: "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I've kinda lost track myself....
Mystery Science Theater 3000: "Reptilicus"
At last it can be told! We had shelled out the big bucks over a year earlier as a Christmas gift, and our big gamble was about to pay off. Actually,...
Kedi: Nine Lives: Cats in Istanbul
If one were to compare the experience of watching Kedi to watching about 75 minutes of cat-based YouTube videos, the comparison would perhaps be...
It Happened One Night (1934)
The Flower has been excited since this film turned up on the "flashback" schedule back in December. Years ago, I gave her a CD of Judy Garland's...
Bitter Harvest
Well, golly, it's been several months since I've asked the immortal question: Why is the New York Times allowed to exist? When not slandering the...
John Wick 2
The thing about action movies is that when they're done well, they look effortless. In fact, a common critical sneer against the genre is that anyone...
Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Well, hell. I had gotten out of going to see When Harry Met Sally. And it's not that I don't like that movie, but I don't find myself nostalgic for...
An Affair To Remember (1957)
Sixty years later, a big part of the reason the Cary Grant/Deborah Kerr romantic flick is remembered is due to the 1993 Nora Ephron romance Sleepless...
The Salesman
We've sung the praises of Persian director Asghar Farhadi before on these pages. A Separation was a truly fine film, as was (to a lesser degree,...
Gone With The Wind (1939)
Oh, fiddle-dee-dee, you never know what modern kids will think of a four-hour movie about a conniving civil-war Jezebel like Scarlett O'Hara, and my...
Blade Runner: The Final Cut (1982)
Few movies of the past 35 years have been as influential as Ridley Scott's 1982 science-fiction classic Blade Runner. Most of the sci-fi of these...
Toni Erdmann
In the immortal words of one of those foul-mouthed "South Park" kids: What the [bleep] is wrong with German people? They're BOTH German. Toni...
Harold and Maude (1971)
My mother and father had very little in common taste-wise. I assume, like all blushing young lovers, they agreed on everything at first, but the...
Goodfellas (1990)
I try to deny it but in the final analysis I am just not a Martin Scorsese kind of guy. Can't even spell his name properly. (I want to spell it...
Time After Time (1979)
If you fall, I will catch you, I will be waiting. Time after time. That's right! The blockbuster 1979 movie based on Cyndi Lauper's 1983 smash-hit...
Army of Darkness (1992)
"Good. Bad. I'm the guy with the gun." "THIS! Is my BOOMSTICK!" I've never claimed to be a good parent. I'm just around a lot. And, because I'm...
North by Northwest (1959)
It's probably only interesting to me and a few other nerds that Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick both have seven films in IMDB's top 250. Of...
Manchester By The Sea
I was on the fence about this one. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's last film (as auteur) was Margaret, which I did not see. His prior film was...
La La Land
You never know. That's sort of become my mantra. With my "reading-all-my-books" project, I've had a poor record of guessing which books I'd like, and...
Singin' In The Rain (1951)
The Flower avoided all films over the past two weeks to make sure she was over her cold well enough to see and enjoy this film. She was, as the kids...
Lion
One expects certain things from award season films. Competent crafstmanship, primarily, and typically actor-strong material. They will, of course, en...
Time Bandits (1981)
Oh-rye-in-eye-ay, oh-rye-in-eye-ay, oh-rye-in-eye-key-oo-lay. Ka-lay-oo-lao-ay, oh-rye-in-eye-ay, sya-tay-lee-ay-vee-show! I saw Time Bandits when it...
2001: A Space Odyssey (1969)
It is, perhaps, fitting that our first film of the New Year should be Kubrick's tale of—wait, what's this movie about again? And why is it fitting?...
Fences
This would be the last film we would see in 2016, and I was really, really on the fence (ha!) about it. (We were actually planning to see Manchester...
Die Hard
TNow I have a machine gun: Ho. Ho. Ho. Alan Rickman reading this is what makes it work. Setting aside the issue of whether Die Hard is a Christmas...
Rifftrax Holiday Special Double Feature: Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, Selected Shorts
They call him S-A-N-T-A! C-L-A-U-S! Hooray for Santy Claus! It is common for B-movies to pad out their length in some scurrilous fashion, such as by...
The Handmaiden (2016)
Nothing says "Christmas Eve" like some rather explicit Korean lesbian eroticism, apparently, and so The Boy and I trundled down to Santa Monica to...
Trading Places (1983)
This was one of those movies from my youth that I've been somewhat hesitant to take the kids to go see. For example, we skipped Ferris Beuller this...
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
I do not know how many times I have seen this film. It was a holiday staple growing up. For years, it was a Christmas Eve staple to boot, on while we...
White Christmas (1954)
Another classic film I had never seen, and another film—seen just a few days after From Here To Eternity—that had a positive view of the American...
Arrival
This "first contact" type movie seems to polarize viewers with many loving it and many others hating it, or at least looking at the ones who are...
TCM Presents: From Here To Eternity (1953)
The TCM Big Screen Classics for 2016 closed out with this film which, not only had I never seen, I'd never had any interest in seeing. I mean, what...
Deepwater Horizon
Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg have found their own niche. And it's a doozy. Following up on Lone Survivor, a movie about soldiers in hostile territory...
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
I showed The Flower this 1947 black-and-white film a few years back and it instantly became one of her favorites. We both agreed that the best...
Kubo And The Two Strings
The Boy had run off to see this with his girlfriend, and it was gone so fast from theaters that I only managed to get the Barbarienne to it through...
The Big Sleep (1946)
As I was watching the classic 1946 movie based on Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, I found myself thinking, "Well this is all really straightforward...
High Sierra (1941)
I probably would've given this Humphrey Bogart double-feature (High Sierra along with The Big Sleep) a miss, as it wasn't one of our scheduled days...
To Kill A Mockingbird (1962)
As a child, I received a boxed set of books. Four, I believe: The Martian Chronicles, The Big Sky, The Red Pony (or maybe Where The Red Fern Grows)...
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1960)
I'm just going to come right out and say it: Mickey Rooney as I. Y. Yunioshi saves Breakfast at Tiffany's. I didn't like the TCM presents aspect of...
Elle
I warned The Boy in advance that this movie would be weird and weirdly sexual. Knowing nothing about it other than it was directed by once...
IFF: AKA Nadia
As mentioned, repeatedy, numerously, and probably ad nauseum, Israeli films tend to be a little bit different because while they can be very western,...
IFF: Beyond the Mountains and Hills
Film festivals are, necessarily, crap shoots. Often, they're crap shoots with really bad odds. No matter what sort of film you like (or even love),...
Gladiator (2000)
Are you not entertained? ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? Yeah, no matter how many times I say it, it never gets old. For me, I mean. I pity my children. Or...
The Eagle Huntress
This movie, about a young girl who defies Mongolian tradition by learning how to hunt with Golden Eagles is beautifully shot, but quickly leaves the...
Israel Film Fest: An Average Story (short, 2016)
Of the three shorts we saw packaged together, this one—An Average Story—was the only one we liked unreservedly. It's an amusing premise: Our hero is...
Israel Film Fest: Anna (short, 2016)
The Boy felt this particular short was a waste of time. It really did seem like a piece of a larger movie which we probably would have regarded as a...
Israel Film Festival: The Mute's House (short, 2016)
Well, look, it's a bad situation, this whole Israel/Palestine thing. The Israelis want to live in peace and the Palestinians don't want them to live...
Back to the Future (1985)
You never know, you know? Movies that you loved at the time may, on a repeated viewing, turn out not to be as great as you remember them. Especially...
Young Frankenstein (1974)
I like Mel Brooks, in theory. He seems like a nice bloke, his wife was the incomparable Anne Bancroft, and what's not to love about a guy who taunted...
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
In a typically contrarian manner, I did not like the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was okay, as I often explain, right up until the submarine...
Castle In The Sky (1986)
Some people consider Studio Ghibli's first film to have been Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind but technically speaking—and when talking animé, we...
Dracula (2016)
Well. Well, well, well. WELL! There's a documentary (The Ruins of Lifta) making the rounds, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is having a...
Rifftrax: Carnival of Souls
It's probably the completely wrong thing to start out with, but Carnival of Souls is absolutely ruined by being colorized. "But wait", you cry,...
Aliens (1986)
"Game over, man! Game over!" Bill Paxton: Always believable when he's falling apart. If there's one thing that really stands out from the 1986 sequel...
Sand Storm
As fans of the soon-to-be-revived '90s show "Mystery Science Theater 3000", the phrase "sandstorm" has a specific meaning around here. But despite...
25 April
In the field of cinema—or perhaps more accurately, in the field of high volume cinema watching (including primarily movie critics and the occasional...
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
One, two, Freddy's comin' for you. Three, four, better shut your door. Five, six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, better stay up late. Nine, ten,...
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
I, like so many of my generation, first saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre on a crappy VHS (or was it Beta?) on a small TV in an over-lit room, probably...
Kamper
We managed, somehow, to sneak out to another Polish film festival entry before it went away, this one about a video game tester/manager whose nice...
Secret Sharer
It is sometimes said that Joseph Conrad, a native Polish speaker, was the greatest writer in English in history. And it is also sometimes said that...
Rock and Roll High School (1979)
One kind of cool thing about living in this city, is that you never know who's going to turn up. I missed Nicholas Meyer (writer/director two of the...
A Man Called Ove
While we have seen some good movies this year and a fair number of okay movies, there haven't been many at all that made us sit up and say, "Wow,...
Phantasm: Ravager (2016)
We followed up our viewing of the original Phantasm with the fifth movie in the series, called Ravager, I think, because you can capitalize the "V"....
Phantasm (1979)
Forty years ago, a 22-year-old fledgling filmmaker by the name of Don Coscarelli noticed that his films, while well received, were not making a lot...
Forbidden Planet (1956)
Space opera is hard to do well. And it's hard to think of a better space opera than the '50s classic Forbidden Planet. It's also hard to think of a...
Silver Skies
I can't remember when my mom first used the phrase "checkout generation"—which was always in the form of "I'm part of the checkout generation! One...
Flash Gordon (1980)
My mom was a big Buster Crabbe fan and as a kid, the non-PBS UHF channel (I've had to explain to the kids the whole concept of over-the-air TV just...
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Traffic was really bad. I mean, really bad. Like "We're gonna route you through Malibu bad." Or "It'll take you an hour to get home" bad. (Our...
The Beatles: Eight Days A Week
As the Baby Boomers enter their dotage, an increasing number of them reflect on how awesome things were back in their day, and so we get documentary...
Sully
The Flower has been a big Clint Eastwood fan since (at a young age that makes me a bad parent) she fell in love with Gran Torino—probably her...
My Blind Brother
A man helps his blind brother through various athletic feats and resents him because, quite frankly, his brother is a big jerk. One day, this man...
Don't Breathe
It has been our custom, as of a few years ago, to go to the movies right before the annual Halloween Haunt jaunt. Although Knott's is only 50 miles...
Demon
We went into this Polish horror movie Demon completely blind, except knowing that it was a Polish movie, that it was a horror with some comedy...
Lights Out
This is a neat little horror movie about a boogen that haunts a family but can only move in darkness—though with some obvious exceptions since if it...
The Hollars
As you may recall, one of the big questions we struggle with on this blog is "how little Jesus does it take to ruin a movie for a critic?" The...
The Goonies (1985)
I am not, by nature, an envious person. (And to answer the implicit follow-up question: Yes, I think I would both know it and admit it if I were.) I...
The Secret Life of Pets
And speaking of nullities, there's this sad excuse of a rehash of Toy Story. I can see the pitch meeting now: "It's like Toy Story but with pets!"...
Captain America: Civil War
We put off seeing this until the last possible moment, but it had such good reviews (90% from audiences and critics on RT) that I really didn't want...
A Tale Of Love and Darkness
We'd sort of waffled on seeing Natalie Portman's new movie—written, directed and starring Princess Padmé! though somehow this is not used as a...
Howard's End (1992)
I was never a big Merchant-Ivory guy at the time they were hot property (mid-'80s to mid-'90s) and while a later viewing of Room with a View made me...
Galaxy Quest (1999)
Longtime, diligent readers—which is to say, "me"—will recall what I call "The Buffy Factor", which is where a movie so brutally mocks its audience...
The People vs. Fritz Bauer
When making a movie based on a historical event (as opposed to making a movie coincident with historical events), one generally has to figure out how...
Swiss Army Man
Movies, of course, do not have to be rational. They never are, actually, but they typically aspire to verisimilitude—or at least a worldview the...
TCM Presents: The King and I (60th Anniversary)
Sometimes—frequently, in fact, when you're going to classic movies—you see something so great it alters your sense of how great movies can be. There...
Rifftrax Presents: Mothra
You know what time it is! It's time for Rifftrax! (Rifftrax!) And this quarter's cinematic meatball-over-the-plate is the wonderfully bizarre and...
Animal House (1978)
Among the words one doesn't expect to hear in a review about a movie called Animal House is "quaint". And yet, nearly 40 years later, I will say that...
The Conjuring 2
James Wan has a pretty good track record. At this point, it's probably his style that dominates modern horror, whether it's the gritty physical peril...
The Jungle Book (2016)
The Boy saw this well in advance of me—I was kind of cool on it and the girlfriend has more mainstream tastes than either of us (of course she does,...
Captain Fantastic
I found myself being entertained by this movie about a "homeschooling" dad who takes his kids on a road trip to attend their suicidal mother's...
Conan The Barbarian (1982)
Conan! What is best in life? "To crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And to hear the lamentation of their women." "Arnie! Arnie! ARNIE!...
Superman (1978)
You will believe a man can fly. Or will you? This is the big question in revisiting a 40-year old film which, while state of the art at the time, is...
Akira (1988)
I remember when this movie came out in the US and even without having gone to see it, I could tell you what my reaction would've been: "Huh. I don't...
50 Kilos of Cherries
A bride given to a wealthy older groom by her father has her wedding overturned when it is discovered that the older groom is a con man and grifter....
Our Little Sister
Watching a foreign movie is a bit like watching a very old movie—no, not like Star Wars, you whippersnappers!—say, from the '30s or earlier. Society,...
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
The good news, at least from my perspective, about Stanley Kubrick's highly lauded 1987 war flick Full Metal Jacket, is that the second act isn't as...
TCM Presents: Planet of the Apes (1968)
Late summer is always a challenge for The Boy and I, movie-wise. (The heat ain't great either, but that's not really relevant here.) The big budget...
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Well, it's a very SILLY film, isn't it? Perhaps the most self-consciously silly film ever made, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is for a lot of fans...
The BFG
The Boy has been seeing quite a few movies with his girlfriend, especially if they're ones I've been cool on. But there's no escape for me: The...
Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
We've been seeing a lot of revivals lately, of which The Flower is particularly fond—I think her reasoning is "why see a movie that might be good...
The Innocents
In case you thought I wasn't awful, my response to one of our great theater employees as to "How was it?" was: "Well, for a movie about nun-raping,...
The Kind Words
We tend to favor the Israeli films in one sense: We don't really expect them to get a fair shake, either critically or when a small audience...
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
The Flower, who now towers over many adults, has a very particular sensibility with regard to film. Unlike The Boy, she has to be rather motivated to...
Jaws (1975)
It will probably not come as a surprise to you, dear reader that I was not a fan of the summer smash blockbuster that, with Star Wars, changed movies...
Hunt for the Wilderpeople
This is probably the biggest summer surprise out of New Zealand since What We Do In The Shadows, which is not all that surprising, since it's from...
The Shallows
There are now two good shark movies: Jaws and this one. That's right. I went there. Jaume Collet-Serra (Run All Night, Non-Stop, Orphan, Unknown) has...
Finding Dory
I have to confess that before the movie started, there was a trailer that made me laugh harder than I've laughed in a theater for quite some time. A...
Rifftrax Presents: The Mystery Science Theater 300 Reunion
There are several ways to look at this reunion of MST3K originals (plus new guy, Jonah Ray), and all of them are pretty damn good. First, it's...
My Love, Don't Cross That River
If you've read any of my takes on French films, you're familiar with that point where I describe something that happens and say, "I know, so French,...
Septembers of Shiraz
I predicted, when I first saw the trailer for the new Salma Hayek/Adrien Brody film that the Rotten Tomatoes score would be low with few reviews, and...
Eye In the Sky
I had to drag The Boy to see this on the last day it was playing. He had seen a review snippet—I think played up by the movie people itself—from the...
The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
The Flower recently discovered "cultural appropriation" with an (shall we say) appropriate level of outrage. Quoth the Flower, "It's so stupid!" OK,...
The Witness
I sometimes ask myself, "Why is the New York Times allowed to exist?" And I don't mean: "Why doesn't the government ban the paper?" because that's...
Miracles from Heaven
Miracles from Heaven answers one of the most important questions of our time: How little Jesus has to be in a movie for film critics to hate it? And...
The Fallen Idol
In the year prior to filming his magnum opus The Third Man, director Carol Reed took on an interesting little tale of a boy, the son of the French...
Cash Only
In a desperate moment, a sleazy Albanian landlord crosses the mob and ends up in a mad scramble to beg, borrow, steal or grift thousands of dollars...
The Invitation
We always keep a sharp eye out for the horror movies that actually get positive reviews, because they are rather few and far between. There is a lot...
The Lobster
When your mother tells you "It was the worst movie I've ever seen," you almost have to go see it at that point, don't you? My mom goes to the movies...
Deadpool
I had been cool, to say the least, toward the comic comic-book-movie Deadpool. It looked like a crude, choppy mix of cheap humor, sex and violence....
Raising Arizona (1987)
Yodeling soundtrack. Big zooms. Hyper-emotional/hyper-stoic Holly Hunter. Nicolas Cage (nee Coppola). Characters setting events into motion they...
Dheepan
The Boy and I have never seen a Bollywood movie, and despite the very Indian title, Dheepan is actually a French film, not an Indian one, directed by...
The Wailing
We had to journey out to Pasadena to see this Korean horror flick which has a 100% critical rating on RT and an audience score in the mid-80s, both...
Love & Friendship
The works of Jane Austen have been plundered more extensively, perhaps, than any other English language author—although one suspects that Tolkien...
Jimmy Vestvood: American Hero
I'm sure the people who described Maz Jobrani's comedy Jimmy Vestvood: American Hero thought they were doing it a favor by comparing it to Sacha...
Zootopia
There was, of course, no question, once the great reviews started coming in, that we would all go see Disney's latest animated feature, Zootopia. In...
The Nice Guys
Shane Black was, once upon a time, one of the hottest writers in Hollywood, having penned the Lethal Weapon series of films—and the famously...
Weiner
It is utterly inconceivable, in this day and age, that a movie like Weiner would ever be made about a Republican. This is a remarkably intimate and...
Dough
There is a conceit going back at least to the '60s where someone is essentially poisoned with marijuana (typically via a brownie) and their life gets...
Crush The Skull
It was a pleasure, particularly after seeing some less successful low-budget movies (South32, Timechasers) to see a movie that respected its budget...
Rifftrax Presents: Timechasers
It's time for Rifftrax! (Rifftrax!) And it's not an easy job, they watch movies and they make up jokes about them. And tell those jokes to...
Midnight Special
After writer/director Jeff Nichols' first two features, Take Shelter and Mud, I was ready to go see his new film, Midnight Special, even if the...
Kung Fu Hustle
Every year, despite my best efforts, there are a few films I forget to review. Not that you, dear reader, can't live without my ramblings on any...
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
Be excellent to each other, advises Bill S. Preston, Esq., to the puppy-dog-ish head-bobbing affirmation of his pal Ted "Theodore" Logan, in this...
Sing Street
The Boy has a girlfriend, as noted in previous reviews, with whom he goes to see certain films that he discerns my lack of interest in, like The...
South32
There is a saying that, if you can't make up your mind, flip a coin. While the coin is up in the air, you'll find yourself rooting for a particular...
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
I was almost entirely uninterested in seeing the new Star Wars movie. To be honest, my interest in the space opera began in 1980 when I saw The...
Zoolander (2001)
The last of the Laemmle's "April Fools" films was the most recent and also probably the weakest: Ben Stiller's Zoolander. (The previous films were...
The First Monday In May
We were headed out to see South32, of all things, but realized we couldn't make it to the theater on time. So we went to the closer theater to see...
Remember
We had to go see Remember the next day (after The First Monday In May) because, despite it being a pretty packed house for every show, it was going...
TCM Presents: On The Waterfront
"I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody." Brando laments life choices to Steiger. The funny thing about that iconic...
Empire of Corpses
If The Boy and I disagreed on April, we really disagreed on this next animated film which was also a Steampunk future-past-type debut feature from...
April and the Extraordinary World
The actual title of this French Steampunk animated film is April and the Twisted World, but this (along with "free" translations of things like...
Wedding Doll
A mildly brain-injured girl seeks independence from her mother, to pursue a marriage with her lover and a career in fashion design in Nitzan Gilady's...
Risen
The other day, Ace was talking about this movie, which I had heard of but which wasn't really on my radar: Risen, A Tale of the Christ! It is the...
Look At Us Now, Mother
Last year 100 released films made over $20M. The next 100 made over $1.3 million. The next, made over $380K. When you get to the half-way point,...
Born to Be Blue
Ethan Hawke's an interesting kind of cat. You might see him in the it-took-twelve-years-to-make Boyhood, or in The Purge, or maybe fronting a...
The Jerk (1979)
"I was born...a poor, black child." But life is good. And so a career was made, and a line from a stand-up routine turned into what is now considered...
Eddie The Eagle
The Boy and I are probably in the minority, but we actually came out of this one thinking, "The first candidate for top 10." Also, "No way was that a...
Hello, My Name Is Doris
Initially this was described to me as "Sally Field's comeback" which, frankly, I hadn't noticed she was gone. She was in that awful Spider-man...
Kung Fu Panda 3
The Boy and The Flower were both lukewarm on Kung Fu Panda 2, and completely uninterested in the third entry in the series, but The Barbarienne...
City of Gold
We'd had such good luck with food documentaries in the past with—well, I guess only with Deli Man—that we thought we'd take a chance with City of...
The Wave (Bølgen)
If you interview the people of Pompeii about whether they're concerned re the volcano that blew up there a couple of thousand years ago, killing...
10 Cloverfield Lane
The Boy saw an ad for this movie a month or so ago and said, very animatedly, "There's this new movie coming out with John Goodman trapped in a...
The 10 Commandments (1956)
You may not know this about me, but even as a child, I would avoid watching things on TV so that I would see them for the first time on the big...
The Boy and The Beast
Our local theater chain, the Laemmle, which we adore for a variety of reasons (great bulk discounts, cheap but excellent popcorn, great staff) has...
Colliding Dreams
When first released, this Israeli historical documentary had quite poor reviews, in the 50% range. However, having realized the anti-semitism bias...
Only Yesterday (1991)
About 25-30 years ago, Studio Ghibli, which I can only assume was created so that the animators could make the movies they wanted to make, started to...
Summer Wars (2010)
The success of Mamoru Hosoda's last animated feature, Wolf Children, though completely unremarked on by BoxOfficeMojo, seems to have been enough to...
13 Hours
I am not exactly a Michael Bay fan. I love the Team America: World Police song (even though I'd never even considered going to see Pearl Harbor). I...
Miller's Crossing (1990)
I'm praying to ya! Look in your haaaaaaaht! It's amazing how fast the Coen brothers shot out of the gate, when you think about it. From Blood Simple...
Creed
A new Rocky movie. I checked out of the Rocky series about the time Mr. T checked in. (Not that I didn't enjoy Rocky III, but I felt the character...
The Witch
We always like to go see the horror movies that create a critical buzz, because that's a fairly rare event. So we were eager to see Robert Eggers'...
Hail, Caesar!
On Oscar night, I took the kids to the movies because, really, who can watch that thing any more? I guess the lady-folk like the dresses, but even...
Embrace of the Serpent
It's so odd: Almost every year, foreign language films are among the best we see. But usually, we're seeing films from the previous calendar year or...
A War
Kathryn Bigelow's multiple-Academy Award winning 2008 film The Hurt Locker has been very influential on the modern war film. Focusing less on action,...
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
"When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it." And when I grab your waist, you'll dance. Aw, man. Bogie beatin' on poor little Peter Lorre. Worth...
The 2016 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Animated
We didn't go see last year's Oscar-nominated animated shorts; I couldn't get The Boy interested. This year, however, he lead the way, suggesting...
The Good Dinosaur
It was The Barbarienne's birthday—she turned ten—and she leapt at the opportunity to see the latest Pixar flick, The Good Dinosaur. The Boy and I had...
Boy and the World
What we have in this animated Brazilian Oscar nominee is a really dumb, typical environmental, somebody-do-something tirade wrapped in a very...
The Big Lebowski (Again!)
Maybe it's because I was under the weather, having picked up this deadly virus from The Boy after sharing popcorn with him at Mockingjay—because,...
The Lady in a Van
I had some serious reservations going into this Maggie Smith vehicle (heh), looking as it does like the most Oscar-bait-y of Oscar-bait films, and...
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2
We dragged our butts to the discount theater to finally catch this final Hunger Games movie, finally laying to rest the ghost of Philip Seymour...
Anomalisa
"What this world needs," I was just slurring drunkenly over the bar where I don't go because I don't drink, "What this world needs is more...
TCM Presents Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
It can be hard to get The Flower to a movie these days. She has so many projects going, it becomes a challenge to get her out of the house for...
The Peanuts Movie
I definitely had a negative reaction on hearing about the Peanuts movie. This was one of the big strips of my childhood, along with B.C., Wizard of...
Son of Saul
This Hungarian film is probably going to win the Oscar, and it's probably going to be win the Oscar because you sit there in a marvel of technique...
Best of Rifftrax: Starship Troopers
The riffing tradition has historically been one of mocking shall-we-say modest films, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that rights...
Mustang
I hate Turks. I just wanted to get that out of the way. No, I've never actually met a Turk that I know of, except in Western literature, where they...
The Revenant
A bear is murdered by an out-of-control furrier and comes back to life to stalk down his killer in The Revenant! Nah. Can you imagine? We have to...
Clerks (1994)
I'd been meaning to take the kids to see Clerks, so when it popped up last Thursday at one of our theaters, I did. So, how does a $27,500...
45 Years
I really didn't want to see this but you know what time of the year it is. That's right. It's the queer time of year when the grannies of the popcorn...
Brooklyn
A young Irish lass, finding no prospects in her native Wexford, is encouraged by her older sister to travel to America and make her way to the New...
Carol
We wanted to go see Brooklyn, but the showing we wanted to go was pre-empted for a showing of Trumbo. Couldn't pay me. Carol wasn't on my list of...
Krampus
Hand to God, last Christmas season, I said to my kids, "I can't believe nobody's made a movie about the Krampus". This actually isn't true: There...
The Big Short
I was dubious, despite the positive reviews about this movie, The Big Short, which weaves a narrative about the guys who were smart enough to see the...
Youth
Speaking of movies I went into some trepidation, after the morning viewing of Hotel Transylvania 2, I went to an evening show with The Boy to see...
Hotel Transylvania 2
As a parent, there are certain things one must do, one of which is see the sorts of movies one would rather not see, without squashing the enthusiasm...
Rifftrax Presents: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny
This was the last entry in Rifftrax's 2015 series (dubbed The Crappening) and by far the most bizarre. The actual "film" Santa and the Ice Cream...
Macbeth
So, true confession time: I loved this movie, but didn't understand a word of it. Well, okay, maybe half the words. Or a third. Macbeth is, of...
The Girl In The Book
I had grave reservations (grave! I tells ya) about going to see Marya Cohen's auteurial debut, The Girl In The Book: The trailers made it seem like...
Rock in the Red Zone
A documentarian goes to Sderot to examine the city's odd role as a locus of contemporary Israeli music and discovers a rich cultural history not much...
Theeb
This is another movie that the critics were gaga about—97% on Rotten Tomatoes—while audiences were rather cooler (79%), and we sort of went in hoping...
James White
Here is the latest effort from Martha Marcy May Marlene producer Josh Mond, who writes and directs this tale of the eponymous millennial man-child...
Room
A five-year-old lives in a small enclosed room with only a skylight to see into the world and has been told by his mother that room is the entire...
Ibiza (29th Israel Film Festival)
Our final film of the seven we saw as part of the 29th Israel Film Festival was Ibiza which was...well, it's basically an '80s teen sex comedy. It's...
Man In the Wall (29th Israel Film Festival)
This was probably my favorite of the seven IFF movies we saw, a paranoid little psychodrama about a woman who wakes up to find her husband is...
Fauda (29th Israel Film Festival)
The Israeli Defense Force has, for years, infiltrated Palestine for counter-terrorism purposes (which should be no surprise at all) with special...
Yona (29th Israeli Film Festival)
We followed up our film about the playwright Aloni with a biopic about an Israel poetess, Yona Wallach. This movie is sort of like an Israeli La Vie...
Once Upon A Time There Was A King (29th Israeli Film Festival)
Here's one I liked a lot more than The Boy. Once Upon A Time There Was A King is a documentary on Nissim Aloni, luminary of the Israeli stage in the...
Peter The Third (29th Israel Film Festival)
This is the kind of movie we go the festival for: A bunch of old guys hang out in a coffee shop all day, when they learn that the waitress (after a...
Galis: The Journey To Astra (29th Israeli Film Festival)
The Boy and I are always happy to see the Israeli Film Festival come to town, which we have attended regularly (and increasingly) for the past seven...
Bridge of Spies
I was trying to recall, coming out of the theater, the last time I saw a Steven Spielberg movie that I could say, "Yeah, I liked that," without any...
The Nightingale
Here's a lovely family film out of France and China that seems to not have gotten much of a release because, let's be honest, "subtitles" and "family...
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
And would you believe it, o! my brothers and only friends? There was your faithful and humble narrator with two of his best droogs viddying Stanley...
The Martian
If you need to cast someone in the role of a hapless chump who must be rescued, look no further than Matt Damon, apparently. Spielberg noted this...
The Visit
It is sometimes hard to drag The Boy to see certain pictures, but sometimes I can wedge one in that he would normally be cool on, if the options...
The Diplomat
As the opening frames of this documentary flickered by, The Boy leaned in and whispered, "I may have f***ed this up." We were out and about after...
TCM Presents: Dracula (1931) & Drácula (1931)
We just discovered the "TCM Presents" series last month, with Psycho, in which we heard about this month's entry: The 1931 Universal Dracula,...
Sicario
Quebecois Denis Villeneuve, who made a big splash a few years back with a brutal film called Incendies, and followed it up with the equally brutal...
The Prime Ministers 2: The Warriors and Peacemakers
We did not see the first in these documentaries based on Yehuda Avner's book The Prime Ministers, and I am to blame for that. I am always on the...
Aram, Aram
It's been almost a year since the last time I started a movie review with "Wow" and that was Whiplash, which walked away with three Oscars. I said it...
Victoria
A word that is often used derogatorily for movies is "gimmicky", suggesting that some technique used by the artists in creating the film lacks...
Shaun The Sheep
It's easy to overlook, when viewing Rotten Tomatoes scores, that the percentage rating is based on the number of critics (or audience members) who...
Labyrinth of Lies
Apparently—and this may be news to some of you—there was some trouble in Germany back in the middle of the 20th century. As The Boy likes to joke,...
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi
Back in 2010, a Persian filmmaker named Jafar Panahi was sentenced to 6 years in prison and banned from making movies for 20 years. (Panahi was 50,...
Coming Home
In the late '80s and early '90s, director Zhang Yimou and actress Li Gong brought "serious" Chinese cinema to the forefront of international...
This Is Happening
Cloris Leachman, whom Betty White refers to as "young lady", actually showed up at the theater for the premiere of this low budget road-trip comedy...
Rifftrax: The Miami Connection
Unlike its spiritual predecessor, Mystery Science Theater 300, Rifftrax does its comedic riffing against a number of big budget franchises, like...
Meet The Patels
As I've often observed, sometimes the best movies out are documentaries. Sometimes that's because the fictional movies that are out are trash, but...
Wildlike
Young Mackenzie's father dies so her basket-case of a mother sends her up to Alaska to live with her uncle. When that turns out to be the sort of...
Goodnight Mommy
While we do enjoy foreign films—sometimes they're the best things out, and there will usually be a couple of them in our yearly top tens—there is the...
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
When, you might, ask did the Mission Impossible franchise get to be so good? The first movie was, essentially, "Let's take this spy property we have...
Black Mass
If you're of a certain age, you remember having this kind of epiphany seeing Johnny Depp in the early '90s, maybe watching Edward Scissorhands, Benny...
The Gift
We just saw Joel Edgerton as the none-too-bright FBI agent in Black Mass, and here he is all grown up and writing/directing features of his own! In...
Psycho (TCM Presents)
"So, anything good playing tonight?" "Psycho." "I'm in." It seems as though TCM has learned that there's some cash in replaying old films under their...
Tales
Our favorite theater shut down again though at least this time it is only a temporary remodeling thing, and on the last night we went in to see...
Learning To Drive
We don't often stay in our demographic, The Boy and I. Early on The Boy established that he prefers good movies, and beyond that he was unconcerned....
Rififi (60th Anniversary Edition)
It says something about the French that a word for "rough and tumble" or "tough guy" could sound like the dance number in an American musical, but...
The Second Mother
The artists of the free world have, more-or-less, been on a rampage of vicious criticism of that world since the height of the Cold War. As an...
Mad Max: Fury Road Redux
We see 120-150+ movies a year in the theater, and even so this represents maybe 20% of the films released in a given year, which means we’re highly...
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Rosenwald
America’s full of rags-to-riches stories, or in this case, not-quite-rags-to-amazing-riches stories, and I seldom get tired of them. But Rosenwald,...
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No Escape
What’s a guy to do? You stick a big, fat anti-West message in your suspense/thriller, and still you’re accused of being racist, xenophobic, and just...
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The End of the Tour
Restricting my fiction reading, as I largely do, to things written prior to 1950, there is nothing I can say about The End of the Tour’s...
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Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
This is one of those movies where the trailers made me nervous. The story is about a poet who is locked up for committing the crime of poetry, and...
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The Lost Key
A lot of people don’t know this, but the Jewish scriptures, the Torah and the Talmud, talk a lot about sex. You don’t have to think about it for very...
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Listen To Me Marlon
When he was alive, Marlon Brando used to tape record himself talking. (No word on whether he continued this in death.) Writer/director Steven Riley...
Doctor Zhivago (50th Anniversary Edition)
Ask me if I want to go see a three hour movie. (Go on, Peter Jackson, ask me.) The answer is likely to be “maaaaaaaaaybe”. Now, tell me it’s by David...
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Phoenix
We were not exactly clamoring to go see Christian Petzold’s latest flick, Phoenix, not having been huge fans of Barbara, but it was an intriguing,...
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Best of Enemies
In 1968, a desperate ABC network, unable to compete with the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Democrat and Republican national conventions—and let us...
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Insidious: Chapter 3
One place where Rotten Tomatoes really has to be taken with a grain of salt is horror movies. Insidious: Chapter 3 originally had thumbs-down worthy...
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Trainwreck
Judd Apatow movies have the distinct and perhaps dubious honor of being among the raunchiest mainstream movies while also being the most subversive....
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The Outrageous Sophie Tucker
In truth, the trailers for The Outrageous Sophie Tucker were particularly uninspiring. It looks cheap. It sounds cheap. And, of course, it is...
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Tangerine
Should you ever wonder how “in touch” with America film critics are, you could look at the reviews for Tangerine—about a transexual crack whore who’s...
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Ant-Man
It’s interesting to note that DC’s Atom first appeared in October 1961, and Marvel’s Ant-Man January of 1962, which shows, I think, that much like...
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The Stanford Prison Experiment
“Say, what’s the independent variable in this study?” I burst out into laughter and didn’t stop giggling for 2 minutes. Because the Stanford Prison...
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Runoff
Here’s a sort of old-fashioned story of a husband and wife living in the country, running a farm supplies company, with a couple of kids, and a the...
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Mississippi Grind
We had not heard from the writing/directing team of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck since 2010’s It’s Kind of a Funny Story, but when Mississippi Grind...
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Cartel Land
Sometimes you just know you’ve got a good one on your hands. Something about the topic and presentation screams professionalism, high quality,...
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Infinitely Polar Bear
Movies involving mental illness are a dodgy bet at best, tending either to the bleak or to a fake Hollywood gloss that treats it as a metaphor, and...
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Absolute Rest
Sometimes you gotta go in blind. And if, like us, you’re considering the case of an enterprising Persian distributor, traveling the country looking...
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City of Mice 2
The second of the Persian movies we saw, courtesy of Daricheh Cinema, who brought us A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, illustrates the perils and...
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The Third Man (1949)
I think we can say, safely and not unkindly, after 65 years, that whatever the merits of zither music, it is not really a suitable instrument for...
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Jimmy's Hall
I could describe Ken Loach’s (The Wind That Shakes The Barley) latest movie as “Irish Footloose if Kevin Bacon was a communist” but I think I’d be...
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Riiftrax: Sharknado 2
The guys at Rifftrax have hit their 200th riff track this weekend, surpassing the amount of riffing done by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and we...
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Magic Mike XXL
The Boy wanted to go see a movie, but we’ve been in a sort of curious summer drought. The tentpoles don’t automatically appeal to us, and sometimes...
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A Borrowed Identity
Where Palestinian films tend to be of one sort—here’s a story about how the Jews are to blame for everything and that makes it okay to blow up buses...
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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Is the teen cancer novel a thing these days? Last year we saw (the excellent) Fault In Our Stars, and this year we have Me and Earl and the Dying...
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Inside Out
It’s been two years since the under-rated Monsters University, the last Pixar film to be released until Inside Out, and it’s good to finally have a...
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The Wolfpack
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago, I told you how much better your life is because you don’t live in a Russian landfill. This week, I’m going to tell...
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Balls Out
The sports parody movie has taken a beating in recent years. Actually, most parodies have, being locked into themselves being weak parodies of the...
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Pirates of Penzance (2015, Mike Leigh)
And he’s hardly ever sick at seaaaaa! Ha! Fooled you, that’s not a line from Pirates of Penzance but H.M.S. Pinafore, which we all know, of course,...
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Testament of Youth
I had sort of relegated Testament of Youth to “last ditch” territory. You know, where you’re hard up for a film to see, and you’ve seen everything...
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Spy
I’m not a big fan of the Fat Man Falls Down genre, as I’ve mentioned over the years. My favorite fat guy actor/comedian was John Candy and I never...
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Love & Mercy
Many years ago, in the early days of the blog, I mentioned one of Bill Maher’s dumbest bits. “I’m not promoting drug use,” he’d say, “but it hasn’t...
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Unfriended
I went to see, on the recommendation of the white deer of the Internet, Darcysport, this horror movie based on cyberspace relationships: Unfriended....
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Furious 7
Around the fifth movie of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, I started hearing what amounted to reluctant praise from the critical set. I can’t...
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Something Better To Come
At least you don’t live in a dump outside of Moscow. There, I’ve just given you a riposte for anybody who complains about having it rough. If you...
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The Shop On Main Street
Every now and again you get a chance to see something unusual, whether it’s a forgotten old film, or an impossible indie film from out of nowhere, or...
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Kingsman: The Secret Service
The children were particularly reluctant to view this film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, so much so that I thought I might have to go alone. (Which,...
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The Farewell Party
An elderly tinkerer who struggles to keep his friends fighting for life finds himself building a “death machine” to facilitate euthanasia in Mita...
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Fight Club (1999)
The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you DO NOT talk about Fight Club. Third rule of...
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The Wrecking Crew
“The lesson to take away from this movie, kids,” I said to The Flower and The Boy, “is that Rock ‘n’ Roll is an utter fraud.”The movie in question is...
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When Marnie Was There
This latest film in the “last of Studio Ghibli” films is from the director of The Secret World of Arriety, the delightful film of a young woman’s...
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I'll See You In My Dreams
I feel like I should post a “trigger warning” up front here for I’ll See You In My Dreams, but I can’t do that without a spoiler so let me just say:...
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Mad Max: Fury Road
The Flower had been coy about going to see a movie on her birthday. She wondered whether there would be anything good out (apparently Avengers 2...
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Iris
My stepfather quipped, when I mentioned we had seen Albert Maysles’ (Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter) new film, Iris, “I didn’t know you guys were fans...
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Avengers 2: Age of Ultron
Things have not improved in the past three years—and by “things” I mean my attitude toward superhero movies—and by the past three years, I mean since...
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The Connection
The Connection is about the French Connection, done from the French perspective instead of the New York perspective. And the funny thing about it is...
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The Spongebob Squarepants Movie: Sponge Out Of Water
The Flower had planned an evening with The Barbarienne where they sat and watched Spirited Away while eating Chinese food (there’s a lot of eating of...
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Ex Machina
This was one of those movies with EXTREME buzz, which then cooled off, weeks before I saw it. And that’s good. Because Ex Machina is a good movie,...
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5 Flights Up
We were going to go see Iris, the documentary about the fashion maven, but got there late, and figured, well, 5 Flights Up was just starting, and if...
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Kung Fu Killer
One of the easiest ways to get The Boy to a movie, regardless of time or film is to say “Oh, hey, looks like our last chance to see…"—and it really...
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Noble
An Irish girl with a beautiful singing voice loses her family and suffers all kinds of vicissitudes at the hands of men and nuns, only to grow up and...
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The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out A Window And Disappeared
A boy whose unusual proclivities toward blowing things up take him on a life journey through many great world events. This is the premise of...
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Felix and Meira
Sometimes you get critics and audiences agreeing on a modest, yet award-winning film, about a provocative subject, and discover yet that they’re all...
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Rifftrax Presents: The Room
This may come as a shock to you but I have never seen Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult classic The Room. And while this is clearly a film that stands on its...
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Hercules vs. Vampires
And now for something completely different: An opera based on the 1964 Mario Bava “classic” Hercules In The Haunted World or Hercules with/at/in the...
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5 to 7
My son, one day you’ll meet the woman of your dreams. She’ll be beautiful, your heart’s desire, your every waking moment will be filled with thoughts...
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The Clouds of Sils Maria
The original title of this movie was probably Maloja Snake, after the clouds of Sils Maria that come whirling into the valley in a most reptilian...
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Tangerines
The last of the five films nominated for the foreign language Oscar, Tangerines has the distinction of being least liked by the critics (only a 70%...
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Woman In Gold
We’re in one of those odd times again. Large splits between audiences and critics for not obvious reasons. At which point, you just gotta make like...
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Child 44
It was easy to figure out why the critics would hate Child 44, what with its depiction of life in the USSR under Stalin.Spoilers: Life under Stalin...
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1915
One of the least well-kept world secrets is the Turkish genocide of the Armenians. It seems to be only a secret to world leaders, although the Pope...
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While We're Young
One thing is for sure: Critics love them some Noah Baumbach. Especially, it seems, since The Squid and The Whale, his semi-auto-biographical tale of...
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Kumiko, The Treasure Thief
A woman follows a map to find a video tape, and another map, buried under a rock. The tape of is of Fargo. After analyzing the movie, she decides to...
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Salt of the Earth
Let’s launch this one with the three point documentary scale, because I want to get that out of the way and then go on a bit of a mini-rant. Our...
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Wild Tales
I was somewhat leery going into the Argentine film and Academy Award nominee Wild Tales, a series of vignettes that center on a theme of revenge....
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It Follows
Here’s a cinematic oddity: A horror movie gets a small theatrical release simultaneous with a pay-per-view launch, but its limited release is so...
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Seymour: An Introduction
I had not heard of Seymour Bernstein before, but Ethan Hawke was so impressed by him that he went and made this documentary about the octogenarian...
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Cinderella
Speaking of movies with simple stories that win just by being sincere, I followed up Paddington with Cindarella, or perhaps Disney Presents Kenneth...
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Like Sunday, Like Rain
I think of Frank Whaley as the guy, along with Jon Cryer, who filled in the “nerd gap” created in the ‘80s when Michael Anthony-Hall buffed up and...
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Paddington
You know there’s something odd going on when a kiddie movie about a talking teddy bear gets a 98 from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. And sure enough,...
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Run All Night
Liam Neeson is getting tired. No, I’m not referring to his recent announcement that he’s going to give up action films in a couple of years. I’m...
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What We Do In The Shadows
This was an unexpected surprise. The guys behind the TV show “Flight of the Conchords” filmed this, um, documentary, about four vampires sharing a...
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Deli Man
It’s not that this documentary about Deli’s is great: It’s not. It’s that it’s delicious.This is the story of the delicatessen, also of “deli men”...
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Still Alice
So, here’s a perfectly fine movie about Early Onset Alzheimers—I think, pretty soon, every actress will have to have a dementia/Alzheimer’s based...
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Buzzard
One of the things you look for when you visit theaters in the triple-digits in a year is different. So it came to pass that when this little film...
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These Final Hours
Apocalyptic movies are an odd breed. They’re sort of like “Usher” movies, without the cheat: In an apocalyptic movie, you know the world is going to...
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Eva
Well, this is just odd. A 2011 Spanish sort-of version of A.I. or D.A.R.Y.L. where a man, Alex, returns to his hometown to program a special robot,...
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'71
This is the first of two films about 1971 we’re expecting this month, and this one is about an English soldier trapped behind enemy lines in Northern...
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Timbuktu
It is said that the Academy members watch about five minutes of whatever foreign language film screener they feel like and vote on that, which may be...
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Unbroken
I saw this little YouTube video that Angelina Jolie put up about how she had a disease—chicken pox, I think—and that’s why she wasn’t doing publicity...
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Penguins of Madagascar
Science has yet to create a device that can measure the length of time between The Barbarienne never having heard of Penguins of Madagascar and it...
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Serena
We knew going in that this Jennifer Lawrence/Bradley Cooper vehicle was going to bad. But The Boy likes him some J-Law and even bad movies can have...
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GETT: The Trial of Viviane Ansalem
Included the expansive category of “foreign language films that are better than Ida” comes Gett: The Trial of Viviane Ansalem, the story of a woman...
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Song of the Sea
When the critics were going gaga over The Secret of the Kells, I was somewhat dismissive: I liked the little movie (78 minutes!) but I thought they...
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American Sniper
When does Superman sleep? I mean, say you’re out there, putting in a 16-18 hour day, saving Lois, stopping runaway trains, thwarting evil geniuses,...
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Above and Beyond
Roberta Grossman and Sophie Sartain are back! What, you didn’t know they were gone? You didn’t know who they were, even? Well, let me put you some...
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Big Hero 6
There is this heartfelt moment in the new Disney superhero cartoon, Big Hero 6, where two characters have an emotional talk about what has happened...
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Mommy
A two-hour and twenty-minute French-Canadian film about a trashy single mom and her violent son filmed in a sort of squeeze box that looks like an...
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Son of a Gun
We went in semi-blind to this Austalian caper flick, Son of a Gun, and the opening moments were somewhat ominous. Young JR (Brenton Thwaites, Oculus,...
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Human Capital
Based on a book by American author Stephen Amidon, Human Capital (Il capitale umano) tells the story of a hit-and-run on a bicyclist. Not really, but...
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The Interview
Speaking of hard to recommend movies, there’s this hot mess of a film that landed in a political brouhaha. The Interview, a collaboration between...
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Leviathan
It’s not like I was expecting Mr. Smith Goes To Washington from the Oscar-nominated Russian movie Leviathan (левиафан for those of you with your...
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Zero Motivation
If I had to sum up Zero Motivation, I’d probably call it “M*A*S*H but with hot incompetent secretaries and without anti-war pretentiousness.” That...
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2 Days, 1 Night
Marion Cotillard has a bad case of ennui. Real bad. So bad that she had to spend four months in the funny farm getting semi-un-ennui-ed...
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The Imitation Game
I’ve always known of Alan Turing as “the father of modern computing"—the guy who first described certain things in certain ways which have proven to...
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Wild
This is only the fourth woman-on-a-journey movie we’ve seen in the past year, and only the third that involved actual walking, but this is the first...
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John Wick
“They’ll know you’re coming,” the Russian mob boss says to Keanu Reeves, who is planning an all out assault on the well-guarded safe house containing...
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Into The Woods
The Flower is particularly reticent to see any films involving fairy tales, owing to, shall we say, strong opinions on the topic. But when I told her...
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Nightcrawler
Dan Gilroy’s first directorial effort is a Michael-Mann-ish looking film called Nightcrawler. Hungry Jake Gyllenhaal ends up shooting video footage...
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A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
There’s some old-fashioned sleight-of-hand huckstering going on with this new Iranian flick A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. What I saw in various...
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The King and the Mockingbird
Back in post-war France, a crazy Frenchman by the name of Paul Grimault decided to make the first French animated feature, and started work on a wild...
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St. Vincent
Since his 1988 appearance in the movie Scrooged, Bill Murray has made a career out of being the curmudgeon who is redeemed by the third act through...
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Foxcatcher
There’s a point in Foxcatcher—the climax of the movie, of sorts—where I thought to myself, “Oh, crap, I remember when that happened!”This sometimes...
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The Book of Life
At last we have a triple-A CGI-animated movie that is gloriously Mexican in its art design and setting in The Book of Life!The good news is: It’s...
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Rifftrax presents: Santa Claus
OK, this is the third “live” Rifftrax I’ve seen—though never live live, which would be cool, just to see it at the same time, to say nothing of being...
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The Boxtrolls
Stop-motion animation is sort of a weird beast these days. It is, as always, a time-consuming, labor-intensive process (a fact brilliantly riffed on...
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Do You Know What My Name Is?
This is an odd little film. Financed by some Japanese guys and initially released a couple of years ago, it floats around getting not much...
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Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks
The reviews on Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks are deservedly mixed, and The Boy and I were semi-reluctant viewers of this tale of an old lady who...
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The Babadook
Can you say “allegory”? I knew that you could!The Babadook is an Australian horror flick that’s got the good buzz, and said buzz is fairly well...
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Aftermath
The tagline for Aftermath proclaims “A dark comedy about one man’s overreaction!”.No, it’s not.It’s not a dark comedy, although there are some darkly...
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Viva La Liberta
It happens every so often where I just can’t figure out ratings. I get, for example, that most people don’t like black comedy and so I hold films...
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The Immortalists
Here’s a pretty good, if slightly unfocused-feeling, documentary on Aubrey de Grey and Bill Andrews, two guys who are trying to defeat Death. Well,...
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Birdman
A lot of people, in dismissing this movie, have sniffed, “Well, it’s about actors, and who cares about actors?”This is very shortsighted and...
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Fury
Tanks! For the memories! OK, dumb pun out of the way, Fury is the latest film written and directed by David Ayer (End of Watch). Ayer also co-wrote...
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Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part I
I query The Flower regularly about what movies she wants to go see, because she often facilitates our movie sojourns, and she told me in no uncertain...
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Beyond The Lights
I’ll take “movies we’re not in the demographic to see for $500, Alex”.The Homesman, a Western with Tommy Lee Jones, was playing and seemed like a...
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Force Majeure
Every year around this time, a lot of my so-called “friends” in the Midwest and North perpetuate this hoax called “snow”. They post pictures of it on...
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Whiplash
Wow. Just wow. This kid, this Damien Chazelle at 29 has decided to write and direct his first movie, and to make it one of the best films of the...
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Scream At The Devil
There’s a certain rollercoaster that can come as a hazard of the socially connected world.“Oh, hey, Shari Shattuck’s on Twitter! Loved her in Body...
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Giovanni's Island
On the last possible day they could do it without breaking an agreement Stalin made in Tehran in 1943, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. This...
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Ouija
I found myself trapped downtown for a while and, as I often do, I wandered into a movie theater. And, when I wander into a movie theater not “my...
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Diplomacy
As the Allies were beating back Jerry on the European front, the Nutzis hatched a plan to delay the inevitable invasion of Germany by blowing up,...
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Rifftrax Presents: Anaconda
The funny—well, funny odd—thing about the last “live” Rifftrax Godzilla was that, despite being packed wall-to-wall with laughs, the movie itself was...
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Israel Film Fest: Tubianski
After the War of Independence, people were a bit on edge in Israel. An IDF officer by the name of Meir Tobianski (spelled with an “o” on Wikipedia,...
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Israel Film Fest: Next To Her
A twenty-something woman, Chelli, takes care of her brain-injured younger sister Gabby (who’s also in her 20s) in the Israeli Film Next To Her....
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The Israel Film Festival: Suicide
After the delightful Going of Age comedy Hunting Elephants, our next IFF film was Suicide, a noir-ish myster/thriller that actually is mysterious and...
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The Israel Film Festival: Hunting Elephants
The 28th Israel Film Fest has begun! And you know what that means!Or maybe you don’t, so let me learn you something: Five years ago, The Boy and I...
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Felony
The problem with labeling something “mystery/thriller” is that people are expecting something mysterious and/or thrilling, usually both, depending on...
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Watchers of the Sky
Raphael Lemkin’s life would make the basis of a really good episode of the “Twilight Zone”. As a young man, he studied this habit humans have of...
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One Chance
I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with you people. I try to understand you, but I just don’t. Hollywood makes a feel-good flick about a...
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The Canal
The Boy pronounced this Welsh/Irish horror film (The Canal) from Tim Kavanagh “solid”, adding that he was disappointed they went for the “twist...
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The Blue Room (La chambre bleue)
The main mistake I made in going to see La chambre bleue (The Blue Room) is forgetting that The Boy cannot follow mystery/thrillers when they’re in a...
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Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border
There is a Spanish horror movie out this year called Purgatorio. Then there’s this documentary which has the full title of Purgatorio: A Journey into...
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Copenhagen
“Copenhagen” is kind of a generic name for a movie. Is it about tobacco? Denmark? That Danny Kaye song? Who knows?Having seen it, I can tell you it’s...
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Gone Girl
If Gone Girl shows us anything,it’s that Ben Affleck is up to the task of wearing a big rubber mask with bat ears on his head and growling on poorly...
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The Skeleton Twins
September seems a little early to start the now traditional holiday parade of dysfunctional family dramas, but writer/director Craig Johnson gets a...
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Tracks
A young woman in the ‘70s walks across the Australian Outback with her dog and some camels.I tell you, the whole concept of “high-concept” has some...
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Horns
This is one of these movies that doesn’t fit neatly into a particular paradigm. Some of the posters for Horns make it look like a straight-up horror...
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A Walk Among The Tombstones
Liam Neeson doesn’t know who you are. But he will find you, and he will kill you. Or so they say on that there Internet the kids are all hopped up...
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Tusk
There is only one way a movie about a man who turns another man into a walrus (against his will) can go wrong, and that’s by being boring. As such,...
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Atlas Shrugged Part 3: Live Free or Shrug Hard
You know, I’ve been pretty game about the whole Atlas Shrugged thing. I sat through the first one, mostly without laughing, and I appreciated the...
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Something Wicked
We went to see the posthumous release of James Gandolfini’s last (?) film but ended up seeing Brittany Murphy’s last (?) film, a five-year-old...
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The Drop
We went to see James Gandolfini’s final (?) film, The Drop and (due to traffic) ended up seeing Brittany Murphy’s final (?) film, Something Wicked....
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The Green Prince
It was interesting, after seeing so many movies of Palestinians turned to serve the Israeli Shin Bet, to see a documentary on The Green Prince, who...
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Frank
At one point during the offbeat indie-ish film Frank, things began to feel so real that I suspected it was based on a true story. I later learned...
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The Fault In Our Stars
We are not usually in the demo for teen romances, so it took a long, long time for us to get around to seeing The Fault In Our Stars, which combines...
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Calvary
John Michael McDonagh and Brendan Gleeson, writer/director and star of The Guard, respectively are back. Back in Ireland. And Ireland’s not doing so...
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America: Imagine A World Without Her
After some initial pleasantries, Dinesh D'Souza’s latest documentary, America: Imagine A World Without Her, shows General George Washington leading a...
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How To Train Your Dragon 2
Well, I’m confused. When this sequel to (what else) How To Train Your Dragon first emerged, I was pretty sure it hadn’t gotten good reviews from...
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Life of Crime
Frank Dawson is skimming the money from his housing projects and Ordell and Louis know it, but can’t prove it. So to extract money from the corrupt...
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Rifftrax Presents: Godzilla
I did not go see the 1998 Emmerich/Devlin Godzilla in the theaters. And when I put it on the cable many years later, I got immediately distracted,...
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The One I Love
I am willing to speculate, somewhat tentatively, that I prefer the Duplass brothers as actors and producers to directors. The Boy and I have seen...
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Boyhood
A boy grows from age six to age 18 in Richard Linklater’s slice-of-life film Boyhood. The hook? The film was actually filmed over twelve years, with...
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The Trip To Italy
Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan are back! Or maybe I should say Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are back! Steve would doubtless prefer the former. In this...
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The Giver
In a world where…the Dude is the wisest man in all the land…One Man must…Or something like that. Jeff Bridges has been trying to get his movie made...
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Rio 2
The Barbarienne liked this sequel to, I dunno, some other movie we saw a while back. You could read that review and it would serve for this film,...
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Guardians of the Galaxy
I hereby make this (highly dubious) announcement: We have hit peak superhero movie. It’s all downhill from here on out, and the death knell is...
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Mood Indigo
Michel Gondry is one of the most idiosyncratic directors working today, with a style as unmistakable (even moreso perhaps) than Wes Anderson or Tim...
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Wish I Was Here
The Rotten Tomatoes score for Zach Braff’s newest film is a cold critical 40 up against a reasonably warm 76 for the audience. I mention this because...
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Begin Again
After his critically acclaimed musical Once, director John Carney did a few other projects that apparently didn’t get much notice (Zonad?), and he...
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A Summer's Tale
Finally! After nearly twenty years! A chance to see Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale on the big screen!Wait, who? What? Why do we care? Erich Rohmer was...
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A Most Wanted Man
How fitting that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s last role (ruling out the heavily CGIed Hunger Game sequels) should be done entirely in a German accent....
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Le Chef
If you’ve been following along with the reviews, you may have noticed that one of my pastimes is observing the discrepancies between critic and...
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Land Ho!
The reviews on this Icelandic travelogue were not great but, come on: Stella Gets Her Groove Back, only with two old dudes tramping around a volcanic...
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Expecting Amish
Well, this is kind of a weird one. Trolling for a movie on a Tuesday night (I think it was Tuesday) and this movie Amish shows up on the schedule of...
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Heaven Is For Real
You don’t even have to get to the “Real” in the title to know that a movie called Heaven Is For Real is going to have a classic...
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The Shining (1980)
Speaking of Stanley Kubrick, The Boy and The Flower had never seen The Shining, so when the local second-run theater had it as a late-night Friday...
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Life Itself
I never had much use for Roger Ebert’s movie reviews much less his politics, so I wasn’t super keen on seeing Life Itself, a documentary of his life...
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Snowpiercer
The problem, of late, has been the sheer lack of agreement between critics and audiences about what’s worth seeing. As mentioned previously, the...
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The Last Sentence (Dom över död man)
So, what was Sweden doing during World War II? Haven’t you always wondered? I mean, sure, they were neutral, but how did they…uh…how did they…Eh, who...
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Jersey Boys
I have successfully avoided musical biopics for years now, for reasons I can’t really explain. I love movies. I love music. You’d think I’d love...
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Oculus
Evil haunted mirror is evil! Or so is the premise of Oculus, a horror movie by Mike Flanagan.This time, the evil mirror’s victims are Tim and Kaylie...
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Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
As near as I can tell, manager/PR agent Shep Gordon was really, really nice to Mike Meyers at a time when Mike Meyers really, really needed someone...
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X-Men: Days of Future Past
It’s almost like they’re daring us not to go see these movies. First, we got another superhero movie. Next, we got a reboot/crossover where the...
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For A Woman (Pour un femme)
Say what you will about The French, they understand women. Having said that, I must endeavour to explain it in the context of For A Woman without...
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Edge of Tomorrow
Tom Cruise plays a weatherman forced to live out the same day over and over again during an alien invasion of Earth in Edge of Tomorrow.I may have...
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Chinese Puzzle
In 2002, Cedric Klapisch made a film called L'Auburgene Espagnole (The Spanish Inn), and followed it up in 2005 with one called Russian Dolls. We had...
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The Two Faces Of January
After the pleasant surprise of the low-budget ‘80s period piece Cold In July, I was feeling pretty optimistic about this 1962 period piece starring...
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Cold In July
Two thrillers suddenly popped up (how else would they appear, right?) in our theater last weekend and The Boy and I endeavored to see both, with the...
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The Immigrant
If I said about a movie “Well, this wasn’t as terrible as it could have been,” you’d probably think I was saying it was a bad movie. But it really...
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The Grand Seduction
I was intrigued by the Rotten Tomatoes rating on this new Brendan Gleeson starrer The Grand Seduction, because it had an 81% audience rating but a...
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Chef
The Dancing Skeleton Marionette is back! DSM is kind of a hero around Casa ‘strom, having first encountered him as the only bright spot in the...
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Mr. Peabody and Sherman
I think we can agree that the film versions of Jay Ward’s satirical and pun-laden cartoons have been largely wanting. Underdog, Dudley Do-Right, The...
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Godzilla
I have never been a fan of the Giant Rubber Suit movies. I remember them as interminable scenes of tiny Japanese army men firing ineffectively into...
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God's Not Dead
There’s a principle around here that if a movie has a dramatic split where critics hate it and audiences love it, we have to go see it. Nine times...
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Locke
Tom Hardy in a car for 90 minutes. Boom, there’s your elevator pitch!Writer/director Steven Knight (writer of Amazing Grace and Eastern Promises)...
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Ida
I’ve mentioned it before, but it has been a weird, weird Spring for us, movie-wise. There’s no shortage of movies out, but a serious shortage of...
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Redwood Highway
Old folks. They’re everywhere. Often on the road, apparently. At least, that’s where they keep turning up for us. This time, though, it’s Shirley...
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Operation Sunflower
It’s a matter of faith among some that Israel has The Bomb. Part of Middle Eastern brinksmanship seems to be intimating that you have horrible...
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Jews In Palestine (1913)
A recently recovered film—documentary but not a documentary, in the sense that it’s literal documentation of Jews leaving…I think it’s the Ukraine,...
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Blue Ruin
The revenge story has been a staple of human entertainment since there has been human entertainment (Samson, anyone?), and while there can be...
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The Lighter Side of Agony
One of my tweeps, @thekellijane, edited and published her blog detailing four-and-a-half years of her life struggling with, well, life, but...
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The Lego Movie
I’m not a huge Lego fan. I mean, conceptually, I’m okay with the interlocking blocks idea. I pretty much made tall, uniform towers of the same color...
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Captain America: Winter Soldier
As I’ve mentioned, patience for the superhero movie is wearing thin at Casa'strom, so much so, I think I pushed this out of my mind almost...
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Under The Skin
The six-foot-tall poster in the lobby of the North Hollywood Laemmle proclaimed Under My Skin to be “a blazingly brilliant piece of filmmaking” and...
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The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden
The trailers for this melodramatically titled documentary, The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came To Eden, had me hooked in a way that trailers just don’t...
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The Railway Man
It’s been a weird Spring. I mean, Spring is always a little weird for movies, since it lasts from about the end of Oscars (March 1st-ish) to the...
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Joe
“Oh, Nicolas Cage, don’t you go all Nicolas Cage on us!”“I won’t.”“Nicolas Cage, are you going all nanners on us?”“I’m not. I’m fine.”[violence and...
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13 Sins
Elliot is a nice guy. A devoted boyfriend, brother, son and soon-to-be father, swamped by student loan bills and suddenly out of work, when a...
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Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
After Vivian Maier, it was unlikely that we’d see a better, or even nearly as good, documentary, but the non-documentary stuff coming out has been...
Finding Vivian Maier
A near perfect documentary. Between this and Tim’s Vermeer (which technically counts as a 2013 documentary), Jodorowsky’s Dune and The Galapagos...
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On My Way
Woman navigates tricky later-in-life experiences. Is it Gloria? Thank God, no. I was actually a little surprised The Boy was amenable to seeing...
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The Grand Budapest Hotel
My stepfather said, “I saw the trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel and it looked like Edward Norton was doing the exact same lines he was doing as...
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The Lunchbox
A woman makes a special lunch for her increasingly distant husband, only discover it never made it to him, but instead to another man, with whom she...
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Jodorowsky's Dune
What if? What if instead of Star Wars, an amazing, mind-bending Dune had appeared in the mid-‘70s? That’s the teaser for Jodorowsky’s Dune, but it’s...
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Ernest and Celestine
Ah…finally, the last of the Oscar films: Ernest and Celestine, the delightful french story of an orphan mouse girl (all mice may be orphans, I’m not...
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The Wind Rises
The “Best Animated” feature of the Oscars is, weirdly, the one category where popularity reigns over the arty and obscure. Or maybe it’s not so weird...
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Non-Stop
Liam Neeson has quietly emerged as one of the pre-eminent action stars of the last five years (since about Taken), which is just one of those thing I...
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In Secret
I forgot to review this after seeing it back in February.It’s probably for the best.The acting is good: Jessica Lange plays a doting mother to weird,...
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Omar
As noted in the previous review for Bethlehem, I got the titles of these two movies mixed up. I think I had them juxtaposed in my mind because...
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Bethlehem
This was the last of the five foreign-language films nominated for the Oscar, and the last entry we actually saw before the Oscars (not counting the...
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The Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts
We ended up seeing this after dropping The Flower off at a party and so missed a couple of the animated shorts, including the one that ultimately...
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2013 Year In Review
So, the Oscars again, and I care less than ever. I think, in part, it’s because it’s all so rigged. I mean, probably not the winners, but there are...
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Tim's Vermeer
Despite Jillette’s bombastic voice, and their occasionally strident atheism, it’s hard for me not to like Penn & Teller. I think they are basically...
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Girl on a Bicycle
A French Romantic Comedy! I had to work to convince The Boy and The Flower that French were actually famous for romcoms, not just angsty existential...
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Frozen
The Barb had a birthday and the pickings were slim at the bargain theater—Walking With Dinosaurs wasn’t lighting her candles, and I sure wasn’t gonna...
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The Last of the Unjust
I’ve lamented—frequently—on the trials and tribulations of being a frequent moviegoer at this time of the year. The Oscar contenders linger in the...
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Gloria
Gloria is a movie about a woman living life out loud! Unapologetically! Like a Bossa Nova! Or so the critical reviews would have you believe.I...
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The Broken Circle Breakdown
If Lone Survivor had me in tears from the get-go, The Broken Circle Breakdown wasn’t far off, though for entirely different reasons. This is a...
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The Past
I could make a comment on how, if you’re Ashgar Farhadi, you gotta be feeling the heat after your last picture (A Separation) won the foreign...
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Lone Survivor
It would be a fair assessment to say that my eyes began to tear up at the opening credits of Lone Survivor, and were seldom dry for the next two...
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Divorce Corp.
Holy crap. No, let me amend that: HOLY FREAKIN’ CRAP! I knew Family Court was screwed up, but I had no idea the extent of the horrors.Fortunately,...
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The Invisible Woman
As it turns out, Charles Dickens was just another middle-aged celebrity cliché who jumped a 17-year-old at the first opportunity and whose amazing...
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Saving Mr. Banks
I was reluctant to see this film, Saving Mr. Banks, about Disney’s process of courting P.L. Travers through the process of turning her Mary Poppins...
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American Hustle
This was the last film we saw in the theater, early New Year’s Eve of 2013, ending an amazing year of filmgoing. All told we saw over 150 films in...
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Ender's Game
We saw over 150 movies this year (2013), so many that I’m sure I missed reviewing quite a few, like Ender’s Game. We saw it second run and The Boy...
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Dallas Buyers Club
Matthew McConaughey is Losing Weight! Actually, it’s not that funny, since he’s having a hard time putting it back on, I’ve heard, and he is...
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The Conjuring
You probably could just go read my review of Insidious 2 for this horror movie also directed by James Wan, though with horror stalwarts Chad and...
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The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza)
Interestingly enough, for all the foreign movies we see, almost none are Italian. I really don’t know who Paolo Sorrentino, the writer and director...
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Hush! Girls Don't Scream
Sometimes, and not infrequently in 2013, it happens that we see a movie that practically no one else in the world sees. The moving documentary, The...
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Insidious 2
Eh. Horror sequels. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t live without—well, no you actually can live pretty happily without them. If kidflick sequels are bad,...
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How I Live Now
Here is a movie about a girl and her lover that takes place in a dystopic future which is neither The Hunger Games nor Twilight, the star of which is...
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Aftermath (Poklosie)
I’ve always had a particular affinity for the Poles. Maybe becaue it seems like whenever there’s a war in Europe, the Germans go through Poland,...
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Faust
Faust is the fourth movie in Alexander Sukorov’s tetralogy, following Moloch, Taurus and The Sun, which probably means as little to you as it does to...
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The Book Thief
The Book Thief is an oddity. It has a split normally reserved for Christian or pro-America movies (50/80 critics/audience) and yet it’s about how...
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Thor: The Dark World
I am about done with the superhero thing, I think. This is not directly connected to the movie Thor: The Dark World, except insofar as I was thinking...
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Nebraska
Alexander Payne is one of those directors whose movies I view with trepidation. I enjoyed the quirky black comedy of Election and, of course,...
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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
As frequently noted, a la Casa Maelstrom, we don’t ask much from our children’s movies. Just don’t phone it in, we beg. You’re spending tens of...
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Inside Llewyn Davis
It’s been three years since the Coen Brothers gave us True Grit and their absence is hard-felt around casa ‘strom, so we headed out to see Inside...
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Philomena
Steve Coogan plays a journalist/political functionary who falls on hard times and, as a result, ends up pursuing a “human interest” story about an...
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Carrie
“Mistakes were made.”I tried to talk him out of it. The Boy wanted to see a matinee. We’re tied up most days lately so he likes to take up a weekend...
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Hunger Games: Catching Fire
The Hunger Games sequel Catching Fire illustrates one of the major truths of modern society:Reality show producers are dicks.The Flower and The Boy...
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Despicable Me 2
One of the reasons Pixar is so revered around here is that, as parents, you have to see a lot of movies you wouldn’t normally see. So, when a kid’s...
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Like Father, Like Son
Two couples find out their six-year-old sons were switched at birth and must decide whether to switch them back or leave them where they...
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Great Expectations (Newell, 2013)
Or, if you like, Harry Potter and the Great Expectations. OK, no Daniel Radcliffe, but Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane are in...
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All Is Lost
Look, in any movie of Robert Redford vs. the Sea, I’m going to root for the sea. That’s just how it is.We went to see Great Expectations but there...
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12 Years A Slave
Serious You Guys slavery was bad.I mean, in case you didn’t know. Americans wear their slavery history hair-shirt like the French wear their...
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Bastards
A French film-noir thriller about a series of seamy sex crimes? That could be good.Or, it could be Bastards, the latest film from French director...
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Enough Said
I had avoided this James Gandolfini movie for several weeks because I had the idea that it wasn’t very good. Something about the advertising turned...
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Prisoners
You sometimes—if you’re a very, very frequent moviegoer, like The Boy and I—meander from disappointment to mediocrity and go for surprisingly long...
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The Pin
The first Yiddish Canadian narrative drama, The Pin! Look, you know you’re in trouble when they start trotting out the “firsts”. I mean, maybe the...
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Muscle Shoals
Why she’s so dumb, it really is a shameShe thinks “Muscle Shoals” is a boxer’s name–Rudy Vallee, “Kitty from Kansas City”I was just listening to this...
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Big Ass Spider
Big Ass Spider is a title that raises many questions. For example: Does Big modify Ass, signifying “extremely large”, or does it modify Spider,...
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Gravity
We weren’t exactly clamoring to see this wildly hyped action space pic with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. If anything, the wild praise made me...
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Demon's Rook
The next feature had such a tantalizing premise that we swallowed our disappointment over Cannon Fodder and marched in to see it.It was called...
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Cannon Fodder
Our backup theater in North Hollywood played host this year to the Los Angeles Screamfest. Now in it’s 13th year, I was not even aware it was a thing...
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Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde
I ask The Boy and The Flower what lessons they had learned from Running Wild after seeing it. After they made their feeble guesses about the moral of...
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Hawking
Have you noticed we’ve seen a lot of documentaries this year? Although this is the sort of thing that ebbs and flows (like foreign films), this year...
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The Missing Picture
You know, I don’t know if we should’ve been in Vietnam. I’ve heard it was all a power play by the CIA to create and consolidate their influence in...
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A Touch Of Sin
In the “mixed bag” category of going to obscure movies is that you can literally have no clue what you’re about to see, or how good it is. I mean,...
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Wolf Children
The Boy said that this film, Wolf Children was the first to make him cry since Machine Gun Preacher, although he amended that later to say he hadn’t...
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Turbo
Super fast snail cartoon. Yeah, it didn’t really pump our ‘nads, either. But Turbo was one of the better reviewed movies of the summer, and The...
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The Grandmaster
Prior to this, the only Kar Wong Wai movie I had seen was 2046, which I confess I didn’t get. I found out recently from @SueSkyBluez that it was a...
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You Will Be My Son
When we last left Niels Arestrup, he was being a creepy old rich dude and tormenting a poor French girl into horrible things (somehow, sort of...
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This Is The End
Well, it was time for the annual trek to Knott’s Halloween Haunt in Buena Park. Typically we head down around 1PM (to check into the hotel by 3PM),...
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Jewtopia
The premise of Jewtopia is that a WASP-y guy wants to marry a Jewish woman so that he’ll “never have to make another decision for the rest of his...
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Wadjda
A mischievous arab girl decides to become an expert in the Koran in order to win a prize and get herself a bike and if you’ve seen any arab movies...
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Informant
The prime issue when discussing documentaries is to separate the subject matter from the presentation. The subject matter can be good, bad or...
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Populaire
Did you know? Women used to be treated rather dismissively! It’s true! And not that long ago, either! Why, a woman could aspire to nothing greater...
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Short Term 12
People, this is how you do it. Short Term 12 is the first feature-length project by writer/director Destin Cretton done on, I’m guessing, a...
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The Internship
“OK, we need a new vehicle for Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. Ideas?”“They could…put on dresses and hide out in a women’s fat farm!”“OK, good start....
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The Spectacular Now
It’s possible that I am a traitor to my generation. At the time, I found a huge number of the popular teen films of my youth flat-out gross. Not just...
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The Heat
The post-summer days are often among the worst for dedicated moviegoers. Anything the studios thought had any promise was dropped in the summer....
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When Comedy Went To School
We were so looking forward to this new documentary about Catskill comedians, right up until it came out and the ratings (audience and critic) were so...
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The World's End
Jason The Commenter (@BXGD) mentioned, when he saw The World’s End, that it’s best to go in not knowing anything about it, and there’s some truth to...
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Thérèse
Oh, ennui! Where would French films be without it! Well, this movie’d be absolutely nowheresville. What movie, you ask? Well, the original title was...
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The Patience Stone
Even though The Patience Stone has a dozen or so cast members listed in the credits, it is basically a one-woman show, and that one woman has a name...
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Ain't Them Bodies Saints
If you remade Bonnie and Clyde, only realistically, you’d probably end up with something like David Lowery’s (director of nothing you’ve ever heard...
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Monsters University
Look, if you’ve read this blog at all for very long, you know how I feel about Pixar. If we overlook the tragedy that is Cars 2, they have a flawless...
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In A World...
I know the name Lake Bell but I don’t really know why. I’ve never seen her in a movie or TV show that I recall. She’s been in quite a few, but none...
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Letter to the Tooth Fairy
Remember this?The Fearless Vampire Tooth Fairy KillerIt’s been a while since we’ve heard from the Tooth Fairy, but The Flower lost a tooth, and...
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A Single Shot
Sam Rockwell has a talent for picking good and unusual projects, and also delivering the goods regardless of what the role is. In the past few years...
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Our Children
This French movie opens with a woman (Émilie Dequenne) in the hospital telling the doctors to make sure her children are buried in Morocco, while...
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The Way, Way Back
Steve Carell has three main modes: Good guy, moron and a-hole. And whether he’s being a good guy (40 Year Old Virgin, Evan Almighty, Little Miss...
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The Act of Killing
Imagine if WWII had ended in 1942 or 1943, before unconditional surrender became a thing, and the war had been resolved by pushing everyone back to...
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The Hunt (Jagten)
A man who loves children finds his life destroyed when one of them accuses him of behaving inappropriately toward her in the new Danish movie The...
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Elysium
I thought, during the first 15 minutes or so of Elysium, that the melodrama reminded of those old damsel-in-distress setups where the maiden in...
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Wolverine
The Ackman in this movie is big. How big? Why it’s huge!Just one of the many so-called jokes virtually mandated around casa ‘strom.It’s Wolverine...
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Red 2
Who doesn’t love a geriatric caper flick? Going In Style, Stand Up Guys, Tough Guys—well, okay, actually those films were not very well received, but...
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Casting By
You can tell this is a fun movie when the 18-year-old and the 12-year-old both enjoyed it, even though they had little concept of the movies being...
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Pacific Rim
What’s this Pacific Rim movie about? I think it’s best summed up by this poster the North Hollywood Laemmle had up:Actually, the only way Pacific Rim...
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Our Nixon
A documentary! About Nixon! This is gonna be…Well, let’s be honest, it’s going to be hideously biased about Richard Milhouse Nixon, right? Ain’t...
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Mud
I think I was thinking this Matthew McConaughey Mud had some anti-government messaging in it, as a follow-up to the previous day’s scathing attack on...
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Still Mine
It was unusual to see what seemed to be two small-government oriented films in as many days, and quadruply for one of those films, Still Mine, to be...
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World War Z
Zombies. Love ‘em or hate 'em, they’re here to stay, apparently. I mean, think about it. This latest binge-of-the-undead started in 2002 with Danny...
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Star Trek Into Darkness
So, yeah, another Star Trek movie. We tend to see the blockbusters semi-reluctantly, and usually after they’ve gone to the bargain theater, you may...
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20 Feet From Stardom
OK, I’m going to start by telling you how wonderful this documentary about backup singers is, but then I’m going to wrap it up by taking a dump all...
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The Purge
I was of two minds regarding The Purge, the new thriller flick about people in an idyllic future who endure one night a year where all law is...
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Only God Forgives
So, having left the last pic without really feeling our Gosling needs were satisfied, we trundled on down to the Encino Laemmle to see Only God...
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The Place Beyond The Pines
“We should go see the last Ryan Gosling underworld-y flick before we see the new one tomorrow!”And so it was that we journeyed to finally see The...
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An Unfinished Song
Around these parts, Terence Stamp is best known for uttering the immortal words “Kneel before Zod!” Indeed, wherever he turns up, whether it be The...
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The Attack
I don’t think I’ve reviewed Paradise Now here, although I mentioned it in reference to Traitor, but that’s okay because I can now review The Attack....
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A Hijacking
Look, I’m an American. If negotiations for a hijacking on any boat I’m on take longer than two hours and exceed $200, I fully expect some marines (or...
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Detention of the Dead
A stoner, a geek, a princess, a criminal and a jock—and then another jock, but he doesn’t last long—are serving detention when a zombie breakout...
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Man Of Steel
The human being cannot resist giving himself an edge. This leads to what I like to call “institutionalized unethicalness”. For example, although...
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Much Ado About Nothing
The Flower was wildly enthusiastic about seeing this film. What? No, “William who? It’s Joss Whedon, dad!”Sigh. Parental fail.The Flower took a shine...
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Evil Dead
Modern horror movie remakes tend to follow a particular pattern: They have better production values, often ridiculously better acting, sound editing,...
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The Croods
I don’t wanna get off on a rant here—oh, who am I kidding? Of course, I wanna get off on a rant here. That’s why I’m blogging while the rest of the...
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Now You See Me
Four magicians are summoned together to form a group magical Super Friends in the new caper flick Now You See Me, the latest pop hash from French...
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Hannah Arendt
If there’s one semi-comforting thing we can take from the movie Hannah Arendt, about the 20th century philosopher who used the phrase “the banality...
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Arena of the Street Fighter
There are so many ways to look at Arena of the Street Fighter, East German stuntman Mike Möller’s martial arts flick. Though, come to think of it, I...
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Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
There’s a tall thin man standing in the shadowsWhen he calls your name his voice is strong and clearIt’s a dark and smoky place, so you can’t quite...
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Drinking Buddies
Luke and Kate are drinking buddies, and a little bit more. In contrast to Frances Ha, this is a story about male/female best buddies whose attraction...
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Oz: The Great And Powerful
Theory: Producer Joe Roth decided he could make a Tim Burton/Johnny Depp movie without either Tim Burton or Johnny Depp and it would be just as...
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Fill The Void
So, the Internet Movie Database has a capsule of the movie Fill The Void from the Sundance Film Festival:A devout 18-year-old Israeli is pressured to...
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Becoming Traviata
OK, I’m gonna get artsy-fartsy on you. We saw this documentary Becoming Traviata, on the staging of Verdi’s opera for a new performance at the...
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What Maisie Knew
As any modestly educated, half-literate 21st century citizen knows, What Maisie Knew is a novel written by Victorian luminary Henry James that—what?...
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Stories We Tell
Well, this is something different. OK, wait, actually, it’s very much mundane. And yet. Also very different. It’s like this:If I said to you “This is...
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Frances Ha
I spent most of the movie Frances Ha trying to figure out where I know Greta Gerwig from. After it was over I realized she was in Damsels in...
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Jurassic Park
“Let’s go see that documentary for your birthday. The one about the dinosaurs.”“Jurassic Park?”“Yeah, that’s the one.”“Huh.”“Well, it’s either that,...
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The Iceman
Michael Shannon sure is creepy. If you know who he is, of course, you knew that. (See Take Shelter, Revolutionary Road, Bug, to name a few.) I mean,...
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Love Is All You Need
One of my tweeps, @JulesLaLaLand asked for my opinion on the new Susanne Biers movie Love Is All You Need so when it came to the local Laemmle, The...
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Kon-Tiki
Finally, a movie based on the documentary based on the book based on the adventure of Kon-Tiki! You’ve been waiting your whole life for this!Maybe...
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Aftershock
“Jews weren’t meant to suffer. We don’t handle it well.” This is probably the most amazing thing about Aftershock, a movie about a Chilean earthquake...
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Erased
It’s become a thing, you know? The “bad father/secret service agent rescues daughter” genre, sparked into (modern) being by Liam Neeson’s Taken...
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In The House
We followed up one French movie (Paris-Manhattan) with another one, In The House, a twisted little tale of a bored literature teacher who becomes...
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Pulp Fiction
We dragged ourselves out for a late night showing of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s, despite generally being unimpressed by QT’s films, and...
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Paris-Manhattan
This is now officially my favorite Woody Allen movie.“But Blake!” you say, “Paris-Manhattan isn’t even a Woody Allen movie!”“Exactly!”So,...
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Dark Skies
Despite being virtually interchangeable with hauntings, alien abductions are a relatively rare device for a horror film. Aliens can cause scary...
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Zaytoun
An Israeli fighter pilot is shot down over Lebanon during the 1982 conflict and finds himself in the hands of a group of very pissed off Palestinian...
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Sharqiya
A Bedouin who works as a security guard struggles to find a way to save his “village” in the Israel Film Festival entry Sharqiya. (His village is...
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The Angel's Share
A bunch of low-life Scots decide to turn their lives around by nicking a few bottles of a uniquely rare winewhiskey in The Angel’s Share, a caper...
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No Place On Earth
We took a break from the Israel Film Festival to see No Place On Earth, a new documentary on Ukranian Jews who survived the Holocaust by living in...
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From Up On Poppy Hill
Japan’s greatest director—and let’s not mince words, here, that’s what Hayao Miyazaki is: Japan’s greatest director, animation, non-animation, living...
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By Summer's End
OK, I’m gonna lay this one out for you, and you gather your impressions: By Summer’s End is the story of a woman, Michal, having a tough time with...
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Warm Bodies
We’ve seen it a million times: Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy eats girl’s brains. But have we seen it with—wait, what?OK, so this isn’t like...
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Israel Film Festival: God's Neighbors
The Israel Film Festival started last night in L.A. and The Boy and I trundled off—despite having seen No Place On Earth (review pending) the day...
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Leonie
Following in on our theme of moms who inspire their sons to, if nothing else, make movies abut them, this week brought Leonie, the story of a New...
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Shadow Dancer
“Wait, what did they say? Who are they after? Why did she do that?”I would say that Shadow Dancer, the tale of IRA terrorists in the ‘90s and the MI5...
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The Sapphires
A black girl-group of singers make it big in the ‘60s singing R&B! Sure, we’ve seen it before, but have we seen it with aborigines? That’s the...
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Blancanieves
Well, here’s a novel idea, in the world of fairy-tale rehashes: Set “Snow White” in Spain. In the 1920s. And make it black-and-white. And silent. And...
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Jack The Giant Slayer
Remember when Bryan Singer was challenging film narratives with The Usual Suspects or creating (with Sam Raimi) the modern superhero flick with X-Men...
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Dorfman in Love
Dorfman in Love is kind of an unusual flick. It had the kind of buzz you saw for (500) Days of Summer, a quirky rom-com making the indie circuit....
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Renoir
After seeing a French-Canadian movie made by and starring people we didn’t know, the next up was a French-French movie, made by and starring people...
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Starbuck
I was struggling to come up with a proper antyonym for misanthropic to describe this movie and basically coming up empty. It should be philanthropic,...
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Great Expectations (2013, London West End)
Well, it was stagey but not actually as stagey as Anna Karenina. So said we after witnessing the taped version of an actual stage play for Great...
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Mama
It’s fair to say that Mama, the latest in the “Guillermo del Toro presents” series of horror movies is the saddest horror movie I’ve seen since the...
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Come Out And Play
There was a meme about a decade ago on the Internet: “How many five-year-olds could you take in a fight?” Rules were set up, calculations made, and a...
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Bless Me Ultima
Carl Franklin is one of those guys who’s been around forever. His name sounds vaguely familiar, sure, but probably because it’s an All-American kind...
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Hava Nagila (The Movie)
The most iconic Jewish song of our lifetimes. But what does it mean? Where did come from? How old is it? Why the heck is it so popular? What’s the...
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Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D
There is an iconic and memorable shot in the 1974 splatter-fest Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Teri McMinn approaches the house where Leatherface has...
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The Untouchables (1987)
I was a Brian De Palma fan before it was cool. No, wait, that can’t be right. I’m not that old. I was Brian De Palma fan in the long dry spells...
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Genius On Hold
What’s a good progressive to do? You wanna make this compelling documentary about how a brilliant inventor was driven to a life of crime by a...
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Emperor
Tommy Lee Jones is MacArthur. Sorta. In the new movie Emperor from Peter Webber (Hannibal Rising, Girl With The Pearl Earring), Jones plays The...
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Koch
“You know who New York City really needed as a mayor?”“Pinochet?”“Exactly!”So The Boy and I decreed after watching the documentary on three-term...
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No
A shallow ad campaign paves the way for socialism to emerge in a previously economically free country!Well, that’s one way to view No, the story of...
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Jack Reacher
So, Jack Reacher is a thing. Not a thing I’m aware of, but one of those roles, like Anne Rice’s Lestat, that people care about and are pretty sure...
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Like Someone In Love
A prostitute reluctantly goes to a client rather than visiting her grandmother who is sitting in a train station waiting. The client turns out to be...
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Hitler's Children
If movies have taught me anything, it’s don’t be a Nazi. I mean, except for Intolerable CrueltyInglorius Basterds. I’m pretty sure that was about how...
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Side Effects
Steven Soderbergh is back, this time with the tale of an evil pharmaceutical company whose evil drug has evil side-effects—or is it?Well, actually,...
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The Gatekeepers
A documentary about Shin Bet! Yay! Wait, who?Shin Bet is something like the Israeli FBI which is the sort of comparison that invites recognition...
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Lore
At the close of World War II, a Nazi girl must lead her young siblings across a divided Germany to find safety in Hamburg—and her only hope lies in a...
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A Good Day To Die Hard
In Soviet Russia, hards dye you. Or something. I’m not good with memes. This is one of those movies that needs no reviewing, really. After 25 years...
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Chasing Mavericks
In our desperate gambit to avoid seeing Amour, we’ve been grasping at whatever movie might be passable entertainment, even if it’s not something...
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Stand Up Guys
Al Pacino gets out of jail after a long stint, to be picked up by his only friend, Christopher Walken, who’s also contracted (after a fashion) to...
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56 Up
Nearly 50 years ago, a young Michael Apted filmed interviews with a group of seven-year-olds, asking about their dreams and aspirations, how they...
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Bullet To The Head
Our favorite theater is closing down—or more accurately, changing ownership from our local, indie-friendly chain, to monster conglomcinemaco AMC, and...
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Sinister
From the makers of…some other horror movies that you may or may not have liked, nor even remember, comes Sinister, the tale of a true crime author...
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Quartet
Dustin Hoffman directs! While this is a dubious omen, to be sure (“guy famous for low-key method acting moves behind the camera for the first time at...
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Life of Pi
So, on the one hand, I had iffy feelings about seeing the movie Life of Pi, due to a sort of New Age-y feel, while on the other, I had Sue SkyBluez...
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Silent Hill: Revelation
I’m a big proponent of not disappointing people. At least in terms of movies. One problem I have with Michale Haeneke (Cache, White Ribbon) movies is...
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Anna Karenina
I don’t know. Maybe we’re just in a good mood. Anna Karenina is one of the movies we avoided seeing when it came out. The trailer looked reasonably...
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The Rabbi's Cat
The Boy has been cheerfully commenting on our good luck in moviegoing lately. We’re usually pretty low at this point in the award season, having been...
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Hotel Transylvania
Deep into award season, you get desperate. We’d been debating whether to see Hotel Transylvania since before it came out back in September. The movie...
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Gangster Squad (In Color!)
I’m just gonna come out and say it: Sylvester Stallone is way more talented than Sean Penn. You can argue about the limits of their acting talents,...
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Zero Dark Thirty
So, after all the caterwauling on the right about Zero Dark Thirty basically being a campaign commercial for Obama, the film was finally released...
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Wreck-It Ralph
It’s not the most promising movie idea, really: A “Donkey Kong” era video game villain gets tired of being the baddie after 30 years and decides to...
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Rust and Bone
I am not a Marion Cotillard fan. There are many French women I love—the Isabelles (Huppert and Adjani), Audrey Tatou, Kristin Scott-Thomas—and Ms....
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Red Dawn
The most important thing to remember going into the 2012 remake of Red Dawn is that the original, like so many classic action films of the ‘80s,...
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The Impossible
While The Impossible is about a disaster—the terrible 2004 tsunami, to be specific—it is not, in fact, a disaster movie. That is to say, the genre...
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Barbara
Barbara is a doctor in East Germany in 1980—which let me tell you, is as much fun as it sounds—in the eponymous movie from Germany’s Christian...
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Pitch Perfect
I admit when Darcysport told me her kid (a teen boy!) wanted to see Pitch Perfect I looked a little askance. This is a movie that screams GAY!! more...
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Les Miserables
I had largely avoided the ‘80s phenomenon that was Les Miserables but as the title cards rolled on this movie version of the opera, I suddenly...
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The Hobbit (or there)
Get it? Get it? See, the novel The Hobbit has an alternate title of “Or there and back again” but since this is going to be a trilogy, the first...
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Paranormal Activity 4: This Time, It's Again
So, the joke running around about Paranormal Activity 4 goes something like “Isn’t the activity pretty normal by this point?” Haw haw haw haw! Let’s...
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Dredd
It would be damning with faint praise to say the new cinematic interpretation of the British superhero Judge Dredd was better than the old 1995 one...
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Hitchcock
The Flower is at the age where she’s starting to get more cultural references (at least more outside juvenilia) and this naturally exciting...
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The Central Park Five
I had not known that the Central Park Five were black (and black-ish) until today. Nor did I hear that they had been exonerated ten years ago, which...
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The Man Who Shook The Hand Of Vicente Fernandez
It’s a common fate of yesterday’s stars to end up, at the end of their lives, starring in low budget films. This can be tragic or exploitative, and a...
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A Late Quartet
The real problem with the sort of award-baiting drama like A Late Quartet is that we’re most likely to end up wanting to strangle all the characters....
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Killing Them Softly
Some low-level thugs get the bright idea to knock over a card game run by some high-level thugs and are hunted down by the high level thugs.Sure,...
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The Silver Linings Playbook
When I was deciding whether or not to bring The Flower to David O. Russell’s latest, The Silver Linings Playbook, I checked over at IMDB’s parental...
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Lincoln
Did you know that Abraham Lincoln was our first ninja President? (Our second, of course, being Grover Cleveland.) It’s true! As Steven Spielberg...
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Flight
“This is your captain speaking. If you look out the right side of the plane, you’ll see we’re passing over the Grand Canyon.”“This is your captain...
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A Royal Affair (En kongelig affære)
I don’t know about you but when I hear “royal Danish” I think of pastry, or possibly those cookies that aren’t great but are hard to stop eating. So...
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Perks of Being a Wallflower
Ah. Teen angst. Where would cinema be without it? No John Hughes. No causeless rebels. Jungles of ordinary foliage rather than of blackboards…But...
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Frankenweenie
Tim Burton is back! Way back! All the way back to his original brief stint with Disney which, I think, began and ended with his short film...
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ParaNorman
You get a lot more corpse-based comedy in the new stop-motion animated ParaNorman than you do in your average kid-flick. Storyboard artist Chris...
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President Evil: Redistribution
How could I pass up that title? And you gotta admit, it’s a lot scarier than anything to come out of the Resident Evil franchise, on which we are...
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Skyfall
Bond. Gold Bond. That’s what secret agents say when they go to the pharmacist for jock itch. Which is apropos of nothing but a lame intro to the...
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The Posession
What if, instead of centering around Roman Catholics, The Exorcist had centered around orthodox Judaism instead? If you’ve ever asked yourself that...
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The Sessions
What’s a paralytic polio victim to do, once he’s hit 38 and wants to get some action?I’m assuming here, the guy has no game, what with being in an...
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House At The End Of The Street
I suspect The Boy has a little bit of a “thing” for Jennifer Lawrence, so when House At The End Of The Street came to the bargain theater at an...
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Bully
I had wondered why I was seeing so much buzz for Bully, the documentary about school bullying and its consequences until it came to the local bargain...
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The Expendables 2
The Expendables are back! And this time they’re caaaaampy! Well, not really, but pretty much all the pretense of gritty seriousness—really, the low...
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Seven Psychopaths
The team that brought you In Bruges and The Guard is back, doin’ what they do best. (Basically, making you laugh at slightly awkward and/or totally...
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Loopoopoopooper
Time travel is tricky. Not the mechanics; those are impossible. The logic. This was best expressed in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me”:“Oh,...
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Loving "Hating Breitbart"
Well, it was a 25 mile drive into the wilds of Burbank, but The Boy and I caught the documentary Hating Breitbart two weeks ago.I haven’t written...
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Atlas Shrugged 2: The Shruggening
Is one obliged to see films that reinforce and promote their political and moral beliefs, no matter the quality of those films? I’ve seen that...
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Taken 2
Liam Neeson is at it again, kicking ass in the Gray Unknown Taken Titan Wars 2! Er, wait. That’s not right. This is…uh…just plain ol’ Taken 2, a...
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Searching For Sugar Man
So, back around 1970, labels were going nuts trying to find “New Bob Dylans”. Or, as Loudon Wainwright III sings it, in his “Talking New Bob Dylan”...
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Argo Eff Yourself
Ben Affleck is at it again, directing and starring in yet another interesting and entertaining picture, and proving that not only does he actually...
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Lawrence of Arabia (50th Anniversary Restoration)
Is Lawrence of Arabia the greatest film by the greatest director who ever lived? No, probably not. But that occurred to me as I sat down to write...
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Won't Back Down
Okay, here’s the thing: I hate education movies. Hate them. Haaaaaaaaaaate them. Even the good ones. Even the ones I like, I hate. They’re always...
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Fred Won't Move Out
Sometimes, we go to the movies because it’s time to go. And sometimes, ya gotta go in mostly blind because the alternatives (in this case Won’t Back...
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End Of Watch
David Ayer, the writer of such cop dramas as S.W.A.T. and Training Day (to say nothing having penned the original movie in The Fast And Furious...
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Trouble With The Curve
It’s not impossible that critics (and some amateur reviewers) were unswayed by Eastwood’s speech to an empty chair at the RNC when reviewing Trouble...
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Arbitrage
An early entry in the Oscar race, Arbitrage is the story of a high finance dude who gets himself into a bit of a pickle. This makes an interesting...
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Brave
It’s probably enough to say Pixar? Brave? Redemption! to herald this latest animated feature, in which Pixar atones for the disastrous and tragic...
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Wild Horse, Wild Ride
So, here’s the premise: Every year the government rounds up hundreds of horses, and the Mustang Heritage Foundation (I think) throws what it calls...
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The Apparition
I realize how trite this sounds – like the inevitable dog in the ghost story, which always growls before his master sees the sheeted figure…—H. P....
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2016: Obama's America
I thought Dinesh D'Souza’s anti-colonialist theory of Obama’s actions was a classic case of over-thinking things when first I heard of it, and it’s...
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Lawless
I didn’t know this movie was a thing when I hauled The Boy to the theater to see it. But I guess director John Hillcoat (The Road) and writer Nick...
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Robot And Frank
This is one of those movies where the trailer seems to give away the whole thing, like Hope Springs.In fact, if you haven’t seen the trailer, skip...
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It Is No Dream: The Theodor Herzl Story
“If you will it, it is no dream.”You’re fucking twenty minutes late, man. What the fuck is that?“"Thedor Herzl?”“Huh?”“State of Israel. If you will...
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The Bourne Legacy
A Bourne movie without Bourne? Sure, why not?If we’re being honest, Bourne is the weakest part of the Bourne movies. Not Matt Damon, but the...
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Ted
It’s a two hour “Family Guy” episode. That’s all you need to know about Ted, Seth MacFarlane’s tale of a little boy who gets his wish for a real-live...
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Killer Joe
William Friedkin is back, reprising his work with Bug playwright Tracy Letts, in this malignant little tumor of a film called Killer Joe.Story: Chris...
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For Greater Glory
So, one of our greatest predictors of movie quality these days is the critic/viewer split. Movies like Machine Gun Preacher, Blue Like Jazz and Act...
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The Green Wave
Up next in our series of revolutions-by-Twitter documentary is The Green Wave, the story of the Iranian revolution, as told through interviews, some...
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Hope Springs
My dad hated Meryl Streep. He used to paraphrase Katharine Hepburn’s criticism, “Wind her up and she acts.” I mention this because he used to rant...
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Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
Use the phrase “conceptual artist” around me and you’re likely to get an involuntary eye roll. It’s not that I think that there is no such thing,...
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The Queen of Versailles
The theater had to put “DOC” next to The Queen of Versailles because a lot of people are apparently showing up thinking it’s the French historical...
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The Dark Knight Rises
It was a fair bet that the last movie in Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy was not going to live up to the ridiculous hype of the second movie. But I...
The Intouchables
A French movie about a quadriplegic who hires a thuggish black dude to take care of him. What could possibly go wrong? Seriously, if you encapsulated...
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Beasts of the Southern Wild
OK, I loved this movie about the little girl growing up in “The Bathtub”, a fictional island off the southern coast of Louisiana which is hit by a...
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Spider-man again? Amazing!
When your eleven-year-old responds to a reboot with “Already?!” then that may be a sign that said reboot is a bit premature.Frankly, I didn’t think...
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The Matchmaker
From Israel (and two years ago, sheesh, way to distribute, peoples) comes a charming tale of coming-of-age in the summer of 1968 in Israel. Young...
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Safety Not Guaranteed
The Duplass brothers seem to be everywhere lately, with Jeff, Who Lives At Home and Mark showing up in Your Sister’s Sister, People Like Us as well...
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Magic Mike
So, why would a couple of strapping, heterosexual guys, a father and son, no less, go see a movie about male strippers? Wrong question. The right...
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People Like Us
There’s a pretty sharp divide between people who like People Like Us and critics, who largely don’t. Not as severe as with the Christian-themed...
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Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
Benzion Netanyahu died a few months back which prompted some interest in me about the Netanyahu family, whose three sons include the current Prime...
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The Grand Illusion (1937)
The Grand Illusion is a 75-year-old French movie by Jean Renoir that finds its parallel in American movies like Stalag 17 and The Great Escape. Woody...
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Cabin In The Woods
“It’s so totally meta!” has become The Flower’s watch phrase since seeing the Joss Whedon horror-comedy Cabin In The Woods. And it is. At least, this...
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Prometheus
The opening scene of Prometheus features an alien landing on a lifeless earth, drinking some black goo, and then dissolving into a cloud of...
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Moonrise Kingdom
“I don’t care what you guys say; I think the new Wes Anderson movie is gonna be quirky.” So tweeted the imitably dry Andy Levy about Moonrise...
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The Secret World of Arrietty
I never read The Borrowers, only the Scholastic rip-off books, The Littles. At least, I’m guessing that was the impetus behind The Littles, which has...
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First Position
The Boy turned 17 and on his birthday we celebrated by eating, shooting a scoped rifle and going to see a documentary about ballet dancers.The Boy...
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The Lorax
“I am the Geisel! Everyone speaks for me!” There’s a good reason you’re only seeing Dr. Seuss movies now that he’s dead. The crusty old bugger was...
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Snow White and the Huntsman
I love a fairy tale. Fairy tales are the new zombies, I guess, with “Grimm” and “Once Upon A Time” and Mirror, Mirror and now Snow White and the...
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John Carter and A Princess of Mars
This movie might as well have been called “Don’t Go See This. You Don’t Even Know What It’s About. It’s Just More CGI Crap.” for all the marketing...
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Dark Shadows
The phrase “hot mess” comes to mind when viewing Dark Shadows. A lot.But really, Tim Burton should be happy to have “hot” anywhere near one of his...
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel For The Elderly And Beautiful
Buncha ol’ Brits go to India to retire. Things don’t turn out how they planned. The end.Heh.The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel For The Elderly And The...
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Bernie
I try not to use the phrase “pitch-perfect” too much but I can’t think of a better way to describe the casting of Bernie, the true story of the...
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The Road
If I turned this review over to the Boy, the page would be filled with expletives. First things first, though, this is a review of The Road. Not the...
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The Highest Pass
An American man goes to India in search of a guru and finds one, in the form of a handsome young man who is prophesied to die. They decide to go on a...
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The Avengers
I am actually getting pretty tired of all these superhero movies. Most of ‘em are Marvel, for one thing, which was never my thing. Since the lead...
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The Five-Year Engagement
Nicholas Stoller and Jason Segel are together again (for the second time) in the new romantic-comedy The Five-Year Engagement, the story of an...
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Chronicle
Movies about teenagers with superpowers, they suck, right? No, seriously, I’m asking because I haven’t seen I Am Number Four or Blink or any of those...
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My Way (Mai Wei)
Although the US’s post-war plan for Japan could be considered very humane, it’s sort of interesting to note that WWII-era Japan was monstrous, and...
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Monsieur Lazhar
I am sort of becoming convinced that the field for “foreign language” Oscar encompasses at least one film for each of the 6,909 known living...
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The Kid With A Bike
In contrast to recent flicks with low critical scores and high moviegoer ratings, this week went to see The Kid With A Bike, a Belgian film by the...
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Blue Like Jazz
A pattern has begun to develop at Casa ‘Strom: If a movie is reviled by critics, but loved by audiences, it’s probably a go. Last year’s Machine Gun...
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Act of Valor
“It’s propaganda…but I liked it. A lot.” So sayeth The Boy regarding Act of Valor, the special ops action movie featuring actual special ops guys.It...
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The Gray, er Grey
Liam Neeson’s kind of freaking me out lately. It’s not that he’s decided to go full-on action hero in his 50s. That’s cool. Gives me something to...
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Footnote
“I’ve been seeing all these movies I think are going to be funny, and they’re not,” quoth The Boy in the lobby after Footnote, the Israeli film about...
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Jeff, Who Lives At Home
The affable Jason Segel, who graced us with his penis in his Forgetting Sarah Marshall, plays a shiftless 30-year-old man-child who—Wait, I gotta...
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Hunger Games
In a dystopic future, random citizens are pulled from the populous to die for the entertainment of others in The Hunger Games.Fresh!People don’t know...
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Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Sure, you could go see Hunger Games, but why see a movie about hungry people when you could see a movie that makes you hungry? We were going to go...
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Little Simico's Big Fantasy
The thing that separates these Israeli films from your average American film is charm. The budgets are small by our standards. There are no special...
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The Man Without A Cell Phone
The Israeli Film Festival is back in town! And that means…well, interesting stuff. Israel is a weird place, at least according to its movies. Much...
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Being Flynn
Based on the award winning memoir Good Lord, My Life Is A Crap-Fest, Being Flynn tells the tale of a rudderless 20-something who’s plagued by guilt...
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Woman In Black
Eight movies over a decade acting like a wan, clueless orphan in over his head has prepared young Daniel Ratcliffe well. Now that he’s matured as an...
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Pina
“Is it bad that I understand this?” The Boy leaned in and asked halfway through Wim Wender’s Pina.“Probably,” I said.Pina was nominated for a...
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Ranchero
“So, there’s a Mexploitation flick playing at the Encino Laemmle.”“A what?”“Mexploitation. It’s like Blaxploitation, only with Mexicans.”Then,...
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In Darkness
The last, I swear, of the Academy Award movies that The Boy and I are going to see for 2011 is the Polish film In Darkness, the story of a Polish...
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And The Oscar Goes To...
Who gives a rat’s ass? I mean, seriously. We’ll do the 2011 round-up shortly here at the Bitmaelstrom but it feels like more than ever, the...
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Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
Ace of Spades wrote a rather dismissive review of the latest Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol on his blog claiming that the critical praise was due...
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Thin Ice
Fargo meets A Simple Plan in this Midwestern tale of a small crime gone horribly awry? No, not really, but that’s what I’d heard about the new Greg...
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The Adventures of Tintin
Journey with us now to the days of your youth, and the many hours you spent sprawled in front of a blazing fire reading about Tintin and his amazing...
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Albert Nobbs
I went to a conference a few weeks ago where one of the presenters was a transvestite. I was trying to focus on what the person was saying but there...
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Coriolanus
To get the most important question out of the way, yes, it rhymes with “anus”.Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, and Ralph...
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We Need To Talk About We Need To Talk About Kevin
The thing is, if you’re going in blind, We Need To Talk About Kevin sounds kind of like a comedy. It’s not, of course. It’s about as far from a...
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A Dangerous Method
The problem with David Cronenberg movies is that he’ll never top having an exploding head (as in the first five minutes of Scanners).Heh.Actually, a...
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A Separation
Iran sucks. Just thought I’d get that out of the way before looking at this (legitimately) acclaimed tale of a woman who separates from her husband...
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Haywire
The deafening sound of the collective eye-rolling on Twitter—yes, I know eye-rolling doesn’t make much sound, but that’s the point—when awareness of...
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Carnage
So. Yeah. Roman. Again. Sigh. And Kate Effin’ Winslet. John C. Reilly, in one of his arty outings (versus, say, teaming up with Will Ferrell or Jonah...
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Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
It’s not exactly fair to call Tomas Alfredson’s interpretation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy incomprehensible, but between the three of us, I was...
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It's A Small War After All
War Horse tells the tale of a demonic horse who curses all who cross his path for the rest of their dramatically shortened lives.Well, not really....
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The Artist
Big-name silent era movie star loses it all when talkies come into vogue while the girl of his dreams hits it big in those very same pictures. Sure,...
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Greece Is The Word
In his transition to conservative, the great Frank Miller penned a comic book called 300, based on the story of the Spartan’s stand at Thermopylae....
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Puss In Boots
Well, at least it’s not another Shrek movie. You can start there with Puss In Boots, though The Flower declined to see this, stating she wasn’t...
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The (Other) Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
It gets hard to defend Hollywood—and why would you try, really?—when they seem to reinforce the worst ideas people have. Like cowardice and...
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Paranormal Activity 3
They’re baaaaaacck! Those groovy ghoulies haunting Katie and Kristi are back knocking over chairs and hating on kitchen appliances. Except that this...
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Shirley's Game of Shadows
So we saw the second installment in the newer, ‘splodier Sherlock Holmes series with Robert Downey Jr as the titular detective and Jude Law as his...
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Be My Melancholia...Bayyyyyybee
The third and final pic in our trilogy-of-films-we-didn’t-really-want-to-see is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Trier (the “von” is an affectation) is...
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Hu Got To Be Kiddin' Me!
OK, up front: I’m just not a Martin Scorcese guy. I’ve said it before, I’ll probably say it again. I can explain it any number of ways—he makes...
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The Dispirited Descendants
“George Clooney can’t act! Whatever he does, whatever his character is feeling, his expression is the same!” So began The Boy’s tirade against The...
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My Week With Marilyn
We’re entering the craptacular award season and that can mean only one thing: Pretentious movies! Our favorite local theater got in Like Crazy, Hugo,...
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The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito)
A mad scientist loses his wife in a automobile fire and seeks solace in recreating her appearance on an unwilling victim. Avant-garde cinema or...
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Spy Kids 4: Waste of Time
I said a few reviews ago that all our great directors suck, which is kind of sad, but to my mind not as sad as all our young turks—the promising...
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Into The Abyss with Werner Herzog
Probably the greatest capital punishment movie ever is Dead Man Walking. The temptation—succumbed to frequently throughout the decades by...
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Martha Marcy May Marlene
A woman escapes a crazy cult only to find herself unable to fully get away, psychologically and literally. Sure we’ve seen it before, but have we...
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J Edgar Whozits
One of my outré positions is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t really have a right to exist under the Constitution, and that J. Edgar...
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In Time (and Out Of Luck)
The Boy’s weakness is popcorn so we sometimes end up going to the movies even when there’s nothing to see. The choices this week were between Tower...
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Captain America. F--- Yeah!
I finally got around to seeing Captain Ameria: The Last Trailer For The Avengers Movie and it was…well, a movie. The superhero things are kind of...
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Margin Call
We were even less enthusiastic about Margin Call than The Rum Diary, not really feeling in the mood to have a bunch of people who know nothing about...
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The Rum Diary
“Is it me, or was that a little…murky?” quoth The Boy upon departing the new Johnny Depp tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary. Or was it The...
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The Way of All Estevezes
I just saw the new Emilio Estevez movie! How many times do you get to say that in your life? I didn’t see Bobby and I don’t count his made-for-cable...
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Take Shelter
Michael Shannon is acting weird again! This fine actor who gave such a touching performance in Machine Gun Preacher and of course haunted the creepy...
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The Zookeeper
So, apparently, Kevin James is a bit overweight and hilariously awkward. Surely no more evergreen premise for a film since the days of (the wrongly...
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My Afternoons With Margueritte
Continuing 2011’s French-a-palooza (which includes Sarah’s Key, Point Blank, The Hedgehog, The Names of Love and Incendies) is the Gerard Depardieu...
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Smurf Me With A Smurfin' Smurf
As you probably know, I’m a dad. And the spread between my children means that, at any given moment in the past 20 years, I’ve had to see dumb...
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50/50
The trend of trailers revealing all the plot and most of the best lines of a movie continues apace with the new movie “from the makers of Superbad”,...
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Machine Gun Preacher
I don’t have much use for the movie sites’ ratings any more. IMDB is still the best, I guess, but it’s not good. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic are...
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Moneyball
OK, so from what I can gather via the non-sports sports movie Moneyball, about ten years ago, Brad Pitt (I think that’s the right title) got around...
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Green Lantern's Might! Or Might Not!
I can’t really explain why I wanted to see Green Lantern. Yet, there I was, in the theater, on the last (well, penultimate) day it was showing...
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Drive, Too
We haven’t seen a documentary in quite some time, and The Flower has maybe never seen one in the theater. (I didn’t to take her to March of the...
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I Just Driiiiiiiiive!
In Drive, the 14th (of 29) Ryan Gosling films due out this year, Mr. Gosling plays—wait for it—a driver! Actually, I like the guy, which is a good...
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Contagion: Sickos?
The thing about disease movies is that they’re almost always dumb action flicks. Sometimes they’re dumb horror flicks, but not usually the big name...
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Cars 2: This Time, It's Impersonal
There is a great moment in the short that Pixar assembled describing the process of making The Incredibles. In (creator) Brad Bird’s original vision,...
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The Debt
The Israelis make some good movies, though much like us and the French, they tend to flagellate themselves rather a lot. Back in 2007, they made a...
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Our Idiot Brother
My mother gave me the scowl when I mentioned The Boy and I were going to see Our Idiot Brother. Momma has a very limited range of comedy she approves...
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The Guard
“I’m Oirish! Racism’s part of me culture!”That line alone was enough to make The Flower want to see the new Don Cheadle/Brendan Gleason collaboration...
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The Hedgehog (Le hérisson)
Ze Frenchies, zey are everywhere this year!Well, what can I say? If you can’t find a decent movie in English, you have to turn somewhere. Last year,...
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The Help
Spunky young wannabe journalist “Skeeter” (Emma Stone) returns to her small town in Alabama looking for some kind of entreé into the world of...
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Rio
I couldn’t get the Flower to go see Rio with me, but after it had been playing for four months, the Barb realized she hadn’t had any popcorn lately...
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Point Blank (À bout portant)
The Boy and I love suspense/thrillers. Hitchcock fans to the bitter end. And, let’s face it: If a movie is a thriller, the one thing you know is that...
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Sarah's Key (Elle s'appelait Sarah)
Gendarmes pound on the door of a French apartment in WWII to collect the Jews who live there, and a little girl thinks to save her brother’s life by...
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Cowboys and Aliens
The inestimable @Darcysport, who’s sort of become my conservative conscience as far as movie-going goes, goaded me a little bit about last week’s...
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Crazy, Stupid, Love.
Cowboys and Aliens wasn’t really getting the top notch reviews, and The Boy is a hard sell on “high concept” movies anyway, so I took him and The...
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A Better Life
So, this movie about an illegal immigrant gardener living in East L.A. has been hanging around the theaters lately and I really wasn’t going to go...
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Harry Potter And The Last Goddamn Movie
It’s over! Hallelujah! After ten years, 19-and-a-half hours and eight movies, There are no more Harry Potter movies to sit through! Thank...
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The Chameleon
The movie well is pretty dry, as it tends to be mid-summer, if you’re not into loud, obnoxious and dumb. And I’m actually into any two of those, but...
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The Names of Love (Le nom de gens)
Holy cow. A French movie about a coupla French socialists. How the Hell do I sell this to The Boy?Popcorn. Lots of popcorn.The Names of Love is one...
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Beginners
Longtime readers know how I feel about teh gay, at least as it appertains to indie cinema, and I didn’t exactly stampede to see Beginners, the...
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Super 8
What if a bunch of kids in 1979 were making a movie and they saw a massive train wreck? And what if the train were carrying some kind of mysterious...
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Midnight In Paris
If I were going to write the executive summary for Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, it would probably be: “This is The League of Extraordinary...
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Submarine
If you’ve seen the trailer or poster for the Brit flick Submarine, you’re probably thought “Wow, they discovered a rejuvenation serum and wasted it...
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The Trip
So, Steve Coogan and Rob Bryden take a trip and they make a movie out of it. Wait, who and who do what and why?If you’re like me (and I know I am),...
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X-Men: First Class
We just can’t get enough of the superhero movie thing, can we? Well, yeah, I guess we can. I’m getting spandex fatigue, I swear, which is bad for...
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Insidious
What do you get when you mix Paranormal Activity with Saw? A subtle, spooky ghost story where everyone falls into a wood chipper at the end!No,...
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Everybody Was Kung-Fu Panda 2 Fighting
The Boy and I spend his birthday together every year (since he was two, in fact), and that traditionally involves seeing a movie. There wasn’t much...
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The Hangover, Part Deux
In the least-surprising-sequel category, a sequel 2009’s blockbuster hit The Hangover finishes only slightly behind the eighth Harry Potter movie. A...
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Bridesmaids: A Non-Tragic Chick Flick
Ace of Spades has one of his shorter mega-reviews up for this comedy Bridesmaids in which his first argument is that it’s not a chick-flick, but is...
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Finally! Mel Gibson in Jodie Foster's Beaver!
Now with the obvious joke out the way, we can take a serious look at a movie about a man who is down on his luck, and is subsequently rescued by a...
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The Incendies Conundrum
The thing about the Oscar-nominated French film Incendies is that I can’t use the adjective that best describes it without giving it away...
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Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Familiar Tides
The latest installment of the greatest movie series ever to be based on an amusement park ride has recently launched to tepid-to-negative...
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In A Better World (Hævnen)
Despite the dearth of worthwhile movies at the beginning of the year, the local theaters weren’t using the space to let in the foreign films, and it...
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Everything Must Go
A lot of Will Ferrell’s recent political stuff has pissed me of, I confess, and I wasn’t expecting fireworks out of Everything Must Go, his latest...
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Thor? Why, I'm Furiouth!
OK, now that I’ve seen the movie, my kids can breathe a sigh of relief because I’ll stop doing that dumb joke. (Probably.)Thor is the latest in the...
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Atlas Giggled
So we went to see this film Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. You may have heard of it. It’s based on a book or something.Can you tell this is going to be...
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The Conspirator
I had to explain to The Boy who Robert Redford was (he’s seen The Castle), that he was a director of some merit, and also that he was pretty far left...
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The Lincoln Lawyer
I didn’t really have any plans to see The Lincoln Lawyer. A Matthew McConaughey where he doesn’t take off his shirt? What’s the point? But the Old...
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Jane Eyre
Like Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre is one of those Gothic Romances that Hollywood can’t get enough of filming. This latest...
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Limitless
If you could take a pill that would make you so smart and prescient that you could predict and plan complex events far into the future, would you...
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Win Win
Thomas McCarthy is an odd duck. A moderately successful character actor—one of those guys you say “Hey, he was in Law and Order or something, wasn’t...
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Cedar Rapids
Ed Helms, fresh off his portrayal as an uptight dentist who cuts loose in Vegas in The Hangover, plays an uptight insurance agent who cuts loose in...
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Rango
Johnny Depp is! some kind of gecko-y lizard-y thing in the new hot mess from Gore Verbinski, the guy who brought us Mouse Hunt, The Ring, and a...
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TRON: Legacy
I can sum up the Tron sequel in two words: Profoundly stupid.That’s neither here nor there, necessarily, as a recommendation for whether or not you...
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Unknown
Well, Liam Neeson’s at it again, alternating between his roles as The Magic Caucasian (Narnia, Ponyo, Clash of the Titans) and bad-ass action hero...
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Last Minute Oscar Pics
It was a fairly meh year, and I’m about 30 movie reviews behind. And I have no sense of what the Academy is up to. But I’ll take a wild shot at this...
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The Eagle
Almost 2,000 years ago, the Roman Ninth Legion vanished. Well, to be more accurate, the history of the Ninth Legion suddenly stops. Flash forward a...
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Tangled
So, it’s another princess story from Disney. And why not? It’s sort of what they do, and (for the most part) they do it pretty well. Granted, it was...
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The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader
I’ve always gotten the impression that the Narnia movies are somewhat fraught with production difficulties. The latest movie doesn’t dispel that...
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How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?
This is the story of an architect—which I suppose requires me to reference Martin Mull’s quote, “Talking about music is like dancing about...
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The Girl Who Played With Fire
This is the second in the “The Girl…” trilogy, the Swedish series that’s become a sensation of sorts over here in America, taking up where The Girl...
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Cyrus
“I know! Let’s make a movie about a couple of ugly, doughy dudes.”“John C. Reilly!”“Yeah, and that Jonah Hill kid.”“That’s pushing the definition of...
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Inception
Of course, the problem with lagging so far behind in my reviews is that, by now, you’ve heard everything about the big movies like Inception and...
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Case 39
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Despicable Me
Evil genius adopts three orphans to aid him in his battle against another evil genius. In the course of his travails he finds himself changing to...
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The A-Team
In 1983, a motley assortment of actors were assembled by a team of crack TV writers and sent to a TV series that was a successful as it was goofy....
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A Solitary Man
Ben Kalmen is a hard-driven, successful middle-aged (okay, that’s a bit of a stretch given Michael Douglas is 65) family man/car dealership owner...
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Toy Story 3
Movie trilogies. There never really has been a great one. It’s rare enough to get a good sequel. OK, yeah, you got your Star Wars fans, but Return of...
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Brain--er, Breathless, 50th Anniversary
The 50th Anniversary of Breathless is this year and, this being a seminal film, it was given a limited re-release so that we could all enjoy its, uh,...
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How To Train Your Dragon
Back when I was trying to sell kids’ books to publishers, waaaaay back in the ‘80s, the various publishers would send out rules of what not to bother...
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Shrek 4: It's A Wonderful Strife
It’s always good to remember that It’s A Wonderful Life isn’t a comedy. It’s got a lot of funny parts to it—laugh out loud funny, even—but it’s...
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Harry Brown
Once upon a time, in a magical land called “the ‘80s”, it was required by law for Michael Caine to be in every movie made. Or so jested Dennis Miller...
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The Complete-ish Metropolis
They do this. They find long destroyed scenes or a missing print and say, “Hey! This is the COMPLETE version of this movie.” But it’s not.Case in...
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City Island
The dysfunctional family movie is kind of an icky genre overall. I tend to blame Robert Redford’s Oscar-winning Ordinary People (not a link to that...
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Iron Man 2
The reviews of the Iron Man sequel are pretty much dead on: Good, probably not as good as the first one. Though there were things about this one that...
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The Secret In Their Eyes
A newly retired Argentinian justice agent decides to write a novel and picks for his topic the one case he couldn’t solve. Or perhaps more...
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Cop-Out: The Smith Kid Strikes Back
Kevin Smith is famous (inasumuch as he is) for his idiosyncrasies. You always know “who the Devil made it,” to borrow Welles’ quote to Peter...
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Is It Just Me Or Is Hollywood Looking Weirder?
I don’t normally do celebrity posts, at least partly because I cling to the naive belief that celebrities are similar to people and therefore...
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Kick-Ass
It’s hard to believe that prior to Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000) and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man(2002) superhero movies (as such) were rather rare....
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The Secret of the What?
In a remote Irish village under siege by Vikings, young Brendan is being schooled in the art of illumination by an old monk, while his uncle, the...
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Gas-s-s-s-s-Land
Oil companies have been buying up the drilling rights to properties all over the country. What could be better than waking up to a big check (offer)...
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Ghost Writers In The Storm
A funny thing happened on the way to the movies: in order to see a movie that didn’t feature anal rape, I had to go see a movie made by an anal...
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The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Finally! A good movie! And it’s from Sweden! Betcha didn’t see that comin’, didja? Huh? Huh? Well, me neither. Last time a buncha Swedes got together...
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Da Wolf, Man!
One of the problems with taking other people’s advice about what movie to see is that they might get upset with you if you don’t like it as much as...
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The Art of the Steal
There’s a documentary running around the art houses these days that’s better than most of the movies that are playing. It’s called The Art of the...
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Alice In Burtonland
Sometimes I feel like saying that all of our greatest directors suck. Like, Avatar seems more like a Cameron parody than an actual Cameron movie....
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Oscar Predictions
I’m just not feeling it this year. I don’t watch the Oscars any more. I don’t like to subject the kids to it. I mean, it’s right after the Olympics,...
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Best of 2009: The List
Here’s a list of the movies we saw over the past year, less the eight After Dark movies, plus a couple that we saw in early 2009 that weren’t 2008...
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Best of 2009: The Thinnening
On my first pass through the list of 2009 movies, to determine a best, I shall remove all movies that sucked to a greater or lesser extent. We’re...
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Avatar
I didn’t want to. But I had to. James Cameron’s Avatar is undoubtedly the hugest movie of the year and maybe even the decade. And, you know, I...
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No Man Is A Shuttered Island
I’m not a Martin Scorcese fan. Normally, I attribute this to the subject matter he deals with. I’m not into the gangsters or the dumbass, abusive...
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Crazy Heart
A washed up Country Western star struggles to repair the shambles of his life. Sure, we’ve seen it before, but have we seen it with Robert Duvall?...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: Final Thoughts
Instead of doing the eight movies in three days, we did the movies in five, and I don’t actually think that made much of a difference. You have to...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: Lake Mungo
Way back in 2006, when the very first Horror Fest was, and they had some advertising budget, the After Dark folks tried the angle of “horror movies...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: The Final
Another first time outing for the revenge story The Final, though director Joey Stewart has a substantial assistant director credits. Writer Jason...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: The Reeds
A group of six young adults rent a boat for a weekend to go out in the marshes. What could possibly go wrong?Well, your boat could be trashed and all...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: Dread
If you wanted to put a label on what it is I dislike about “Usher” movies like Skjult, you could use “Dread” pretty accurately. Dread, of course, is...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: Hidden (Skjult)
We started our third day of the Horror Fest with the Norwegian flick, Hidden. One of my idiosyncratic movie genre labels is “Usher” (after Poe’s tale...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: Zombies Of Mass Destruction
This is another movie where the cast and crew were around. In fact, we kept seeing the director hanging around in the lobby while we killed time...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: The Graves
If you’re a regular reader, then you’ve probably grasped that I don’t care particularly for trashing movies. There are a lot of reasons for that. It...
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After Dark Horror Fest 4: Kill Theory
On the scale of unpromising horror premises, “college kids trapped in house by maniac” has got to be in the top…one. So, when Kill Theory starts with...
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After Dark 4: First Thoughts
I pondered last year how long the After Dark Horrorfest could go on, with so few people in the audience. This year, there are a total of four venues...
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White Ribbon: A German Children's Story
Generally speaking, if a foreign language film gets much play in the US, it’s going to be pretty good. We are monoglots with extreme prejudice. (I...
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A Single (Gay) Man
We should be flush with Oscar-bait movies and I guess we are, but they seem to lack a certain majesty. Or even modicum of interest. I suppose Avatar...
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Sherlock Holmes and the EXXXTREME Mysteryish Thing!
I miss mattes. There, I said it.I remember seeing The Wizard of Oz and the matte of the Emerald City that Dorothy and her pals were dancing toward. I...
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Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Cashing In
There are things you just have to do as a parent. You don’t have to enjoy them, you just have to do them. Seeing a sequel to Alvin and the Chipmunks...
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Movie Review: Invictus
The Boy was particularly eager to see the latest Clint Eastwood movie, Invictus. I had some reservations about it myself. I remember all the...
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Up, Up In the Air (san beautiful balloons)
Jason Reitman (son of iconic comedy director Ivan Reitman) is probably one of the most promising young directors around, having directed the darkly...
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The Blind Side
When you see as many movies as I do, you learn to avoid entire categories, either because you don’t like them or because you’re just flat out tired...
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Everybody's Fine
Ah, that great holiday tradition, the dysfunctional family film. I don’t know when it started, but the modern form seems to stem from Ordinary...
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An Education
“She was a young maiden in the full bloom of youth,” or so could have started An Education, the movie based on the memoir of Lynn Barber. The story...
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Uncredited Remakes
Icons Of Fright has a fun post up called “Ted’s” top ten uncredited remakes. “Uncredited remake” is a bit of a canard, because it implies that the...
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Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Flower demanded to be taken to a movie, having decided last week that this week was going to be the very best of her life. (To date, people....
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Ahoy, Mate! Pirate Radio!
I avoided the ‘60s love-fest Pirate Radio for its first few weeks because, well, it’s a '60s love-fest. It’s not that love-notes to bygone eras are...
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Saw VI: This Time It's Political
At this point, we must concede that the Jigsaw Killer, Jonathan Kramer, must certainly have spent more of his life setting up his murderous little...
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The Maid
I never feel so quintessentially American as when the topic of “help” comes up. The whole concept of hired live-in help feels wrong to me, at least...
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A Serious Man
I never miss a Coen brothers movie. Which isn’t to say that my reaction to them all is the same. Besides not provoking the same reactions at the...
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Tickling Leo
If there’s one thing that movies have taught me, one secret mystery that has been revealed to me, over and over through celluloid magic, it’s...
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Paranormal Activity: Return of the Old, Dark House
The Boy and I snuck in a Saturday Matinee in the hopes of seeing Paranormal Activity while avoiding—well, let’s be honest, the public, who can’t...
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Movie Review: Zombieland
Using the template established by 28 Days Later, and bouncing off a little Shaun of the Dead, the new movie Zombieland gives us a fun-filled romp...
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Review: The Invention Of Lying
Imagine a world where no one lied. That there was no concept of lying, even. That all manners of fictions, deceits, imaginations and cons simply did...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Miracle Mile
Here’s a kind of obscure movie that wasn’t out long enough for me to see back in the ‘80s. It perfectly captures the Reagan-era atomic annihilation...
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Movie Review: Pandorum
We’re coming out of lean times as far as moviegoing goes. As August winds down and well into September, typically the dregs of the season are...
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Movie Review: Extract
Mike Judge is someone whose work I always enjoy, even though (or maybe especially because) it’s usually low key and driven by average guys. But it...
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Movie Review: Ponyo
Along with Pixar, Hayao Miyazaki is one of those filmmakers whose kid’s films I look forward to (and have for 15 years). And with Pixar’s John...
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Baader-Meinhof Komplications
This movie—indeed, the entire premise of revolutionary totalitarian movements—is probably best summed up by The Boy, who about 45 minutes (or...
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The Only Way To Win Is...
Phrases you don’t get to say much: “I’m here to see the new Andy Griffith movie!” I like Griffith, though I never could stand to watch any of his...
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Old Movie Review: Revenge of the Zombies
Zombies have been a scourge for untold eons, but as an untamed force—or a force only tamed in small quantities for the ends of the occasional witch...
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Movie Review: Inglorius Basterds
The first thing to realize about any review I do of a Quentin Tarantino is that I’m not a Tarantino guy. The first QT movie I saw was Death Proof—and...
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Movie Review: District 9
I was sort of dreading going to see District 9 due to the summer factor mentioned previously with Orphan. But sci-fi isn’t the modern teen male...
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In The Loop
I’m seriously inclined to begin this review with a political screed. This movie carefully avoids any direct connection to actual events, however, so...
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(500) Days of Summer: Damn you, Global Warmening!
I was running hot-and-cold on the idea of seeing the (500) Days of Summer. The previews reek of This Is An Independent Film. And sometimes I get a...
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Shrink, Shrank, Shrunk
Some of the synopses of this movie about a psychiatrist who kind of deteriorates into depression and drug abuse make it sound like a sort of wacky,...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: The Charleton Heston Three
Although he became a right-wing icon, it’s hard to think of the guy who uttered such cynical and dark anti-human sentiments in three iconic...
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Funny People Who Need People Are The Funniest People In The World
When I saw the posters for Funny People, I thought to myself, “Aw, Apatow finally gave his wife a serious role in one of his movies.” And then, the...
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The Hurt Locker
Like the rest of you, I was outraged by this movie! I needed to know: Who hurt this locker, and why?Heh.The Hurt Locker is the latest from the...
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Orphan: Orphanarium, Part Deux
One of the first movies I blogged about was the Spanish horror film The Orphanage. So it’s only fitting to make my last movie blog about the new...
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Kevin Smith and The Haters of Twilight
I follow Kevin Smith on Twitter because, well, why the hell not? I like his movies (warts and all, I almost feel obligated to say) and his live talks...
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And Away We Go!
I was sort of leaning toward seeing the dark S&M Nazi dissection movie Death In Love, but it seemed really inappropriate for The Boy and the more I...
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Harry Potter And The Sixth Movie In The Franchise
Well, we’re in the homestretch as far as Harry Potter movies go, though the bastards have decided to milk the franchise by splitting the last book...
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Everybody Must Get Stoned
Ah, women. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t beat 'em to death with rocks.Oh. Wait a tick.It’s Iran! And the movie is The Stoning of Soraya M., based on the...
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Moon, Inc.
I asked for tickets to Moon, Inc. at the theater the other night, which was a conflation of the new low budget sci-fi movie Moon and the documentary...
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Old Movie Review: Are You In The House Alone?
I pulled this one out of the ether because of its provocative title, mirroring the “house” movies of the day, which somehow managed to capitalize on...
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Public What? Oh, Enemies?
People do seem to love them some Michael Mann. I’m not one of those people, so you should keep that in mind as I review his latest opus, Public...
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Happy Belated Birthday, Carroll Baker
I’m over a month late on this, but Carroll Baker turned 78 last month, and I wanted to note this momentous occasion. Baker was a sex symbol back in...
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Tetro Fish
One of my favorite movies is Apocalypse Now. I love it, right down to its murky ending. So much so that I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe!
My parents were of the Saturday matinee generation, where a nickel (or was it a dime?) would get you into the movies at the crack of dawn and...
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The Taking of Pellham 1, 2, Profit!
There’s a 1995 movie directed by a guy by the name of Mike Sedan (who I want to blog about some time) called Lap Dancing that I think of a lot. As...
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Etsba Elohim: Out Of The Blue
“I have an idea. Let’s have coffee.” So suggests Shabtai to his cousin Herzel, but falls asleep before the coffee is ready. He has a dream of a...
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Very Badly Hungover Stag Things
I always warn people when they ask for movie advice: “Keep in mind, I loved the movie Very Bad Things.” The fact that I love that movie, a dark...
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Drag Me To Hell (but try not to scratch the floors)
Thirty years ago a bunch of kids went out to the woods and a young director made a balls-out horror movie by hanging from the rafters, attaching to...
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Up--and Away
Seeing Pixar release a new movie is like watching a great figure skater do a triple axel. First, you realize that when all those other figure skaters...
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The Brothers Bloom: Where Is Your Soul's Ass, Anyway?
“I think you have a big hunk of petrified crap up your soul’s ass.” So says Rachel Weisz to Adrien Brody in Rian Johnson’s new caper movie, The...
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Second Chances
I ended up seeing Wall-E a second time, and wanted to post on that, but got caught up thinking about multiple viewings.(This is another from my...
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Night At The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian
The first Night at the Museum movie was a rather pleasant surprise for me and The Boy, who were there at the behest of The Flower. It struck a nice...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso on Friday!: Terminator Salvation
We were going to see the new Michael Keaton movie (he directs) called The Merry Gentleman, but it had cleared out to make room for the new Terminator...
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Management: Boy Meets Girl, Feels Butt
The tried-and-true love story formula (boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl) has actually held up even in this...
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Star Trek: The Next NEXT Generation
I’ve never been a Trekkie or a Trekker. In fact, my mom was a big fan of “Star Trek” and because I hated certain episodes (“Miri”, “And The Children...
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The Haunting In Conneck-ticut
It’s a trope of horror stories that the (typically doomed) protagonists are not happy-go-lucky types with the world at their command. Unhappiness,...
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Lymelife: Life's little tics.
Return with me now to the glorious year 1979, when the air was dirty, the only thing uglier than fashion was interior design, and the children were...
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Rage Against The Dying Of The Light
Have you ever noticed that the English seem to have an unending supply of wide-eyed pre- or just-pubescent boys who can act well and who all look...
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The Great Buck Howard
Remember Almost Famous? The semi-autobiographical tale of Cameron Crowe’s experiences following around The Allman Brothers? OK, imagine if, instead...
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It Was 30(ish) Years Ago Today!
Back in 1978, producer Robert Stigwood unleashed upon the world the horror that is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not the album, obviously,...
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Observed and Reported
Observe and Report is the third movie in about as many weeks where the trailer is somewhat misleading about the kind of film being advertised. (The...
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Taking Chance
It took me a while to watch this one. It’s taken me longer to review it.Taking Chance is the story of Lt. Col. Mike Strobl, who escorts the body of...
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Adventureland
Another case of terribly deceiving trailers, like Duplicity, Adventureland comes across as a wacky summer teen-sex comedy, in the mold of the ‘80s...
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I Love You, Man
“And give me two tickets to Sunshine Cleaning.”Lame joke, but you know I ran with it at the box office when we went to see I Love You, Man. They put...
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Little Miss Sunshine Cleaning Company
We have a lot of slacker comedies these days, but they’re not usually centered around women. This may be because slacker women aren’t funny. For...
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Duplicity: Nobody Trusts Anybody
The trailers for Duplicity initially positioned it as a super-serious spy movie. Then they had a run suggesting it was a romantic comedy. This...
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Sweet Coraline
One important rule of making it in Hollywood is to always be working on your next picture by the time your last one opens, and to have the one after...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Cannibal Women In The Avocado Jungle Of Death
This little known camp gem is the story of a–well, I’m not exactly sure, really, that it’s post-apocalyptic. All I know is that somehow, the Avocado...
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Watchmen, the underlying truth
While my full review of Watchmen is up here, it seems to me there is an underlying truth to it. But expressing it might be a spoiler, so I’m letting...
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12 Angry Russian Men
I was in the mood to sit in a dark room and eat popcorn Thursday evening so I scanned for a movie of interest, and failing that–I just can’t muster...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Watchmen
I would hate to judge an author by the film adaptations of his work, but if I were to do so for Alan Moore, I would say he was a nihilistic...
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Kirk Fury!
The Fury is on right now. This was the first movie I ever saw where someone got “blowed up real good”. My mom took us to see it without really...
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Camorra, Gomorrah
The Boy was recovered enough to take a trip to the movies, though the pickings are slim, with the Oscar films still clogging up the screens. It’s...
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Best of 2008
It’s hard for me to pick a “best” film of 2008 because, the truth is, the term has very little meaning beyond a certain level. As Woody Allen...
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The Oscars Clog
We’re at that dreaded time of the year: Most of the good movies out are Oscar-nominated films that we’ve already seen or aren’t on our list. The only...
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Revolutionary Road Warrior
Easily the best part of this movie is when Humongous sends his S&M punk troops in to crash the suburban home in an attempt to steal their...
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Waltz With Bashir
You don’t see a lot of animated documentaries these days and truth be told, Waltz With Bashir’s style reminded me a lot of Ralph Bakshi. Computerized...
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Signs of the Times, Part II
Seen on the neighborhood Wal-Green’s flashing LED sign:FREE FLAVORING ON SELECT PRESCRIPTIONS
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Friday The 13th, Part 2
You almost have to admire a movie that completely invalidates its own predecessor in the first few minutes.WARNING: Once again, here be spoilers.The...
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Friday The 13th (1980)
In honor of the upcoming explosive remake of the film-series equivalent of “The Guest That Wouldn’t Leave”, I thought I’d review the original series....
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Frost & Nixon & Ted & Alice
Over the years, I’ve had to re-look at most of what I know about right-wing politicians because the stories I got were growing up (from school and...
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Reprint: Children of Men
In the year 2027…Women are barren. And have been for 18 years.OK, it’s not exactly Terminator plot-wise. But while this isn’t a sexy premise, it’s a...
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Best of 2008 Warm Up
The Boy industriously narrowed down his many choices for movie of the year to just three: The Dark Knight, Changeling and Burn After Reading.He’s got...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Doomsday
I haven’t done one of these in a while but Hoosier Daddy was waxing enthusiastic on the charms of Rhona Mitra (whom I only know as the hot next-door...
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Taken: Greasy Arabs and Corrupt Frenchmen
We were just talking about the revenge movie and whether they made ‘em like they used to. And here comes Monsieur Morel (The Transporter) and Liam...
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Vantage Point
Just finished watching Vantage Point. This film uses, sort of, the Rashomon gag of showing the same events over and over from different perspectives....
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Defiance
There must be a bunch of critics who just sit around sharpening their knives waiting for historical movies to come out so they can savage them for...
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Bolt from the Blue
You just knew John Lasseter taking over Disney’s animation studios would be a good thing. In the Eisner years, the “gimme” product, where some Disney...
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Movies Seen in 2008
Seventy-three movies in the theater in 2008. Almost none of them alone, most with popcorn. That’s some cash right there. These were plucked from...
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Thoughts on Best of 2008
I haven’t done a review of all the movies I saw in 2008, to make my pronouncements about “best”, yet.But the Oscars noms are out, and a more...
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David Fincher's Zodiac
David Fincher rose from humble beginnings (music videos for Madonna and Alien3) to become one of the most influential filmmakers of the decade...
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Cinematic Titanic Docks At Frankenstein's Castle Of Freaks, Part 2
I don’t think I wrote this review yet. I’ve been caring for sick people for the past several days and my mind is about the state it would be after...
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The Curious Case of the Benjamin Button Down Mind
I like David Fincher. Not as a person. I mean, he could be perfectly fine as a person, even if there are rumors that he’s a jerk. (It’s not like...
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The Reader (not _iam)
Sure, Nazis are bad. But is it okay to sleep with them if they’re really hot?That’s the challenging question the new Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot,...
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Torture Porn Redux
I may have misled Knox in my recommendations post by referring to Borderland as not torture porn. I see my reviews at the time suggest otherwise but...
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Gran Torino: Grumpy Old Men With Guns
Many have already noted that Clint Eastwood, at 78, dominates the screen in every way in his new movie Gran Torino. Some of this has gone out as...
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Best of Fest
Knox asked me which films I would recommend from previous After Dark festivals, and whether they were things you could actually view on (e.g.)...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Final Thoughts
In total: Eight movies, no monsters. You had two curses, one slasher, two sets of rednecks, one set of zombies, one mad doctor, and one set of...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Third and final day (for us)
Theme of the day: Mirrors. Meh. It has been done. A lot.Look, I love Lena Heady. She’s hot and she can act. But she’s not in her late 20s. In fact,...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Voices
I was pleased when the credits started rolling and this turned out to be a Korean film. ADHF #2 didn’t have any foreign films, and were it me, I’d be...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Broken
Doppelgangers were big for a brief while in the ‘70s, but they’ve had a resurgence of late because of Geoul sokeuro (remade as Mirrors). And,...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Second Day
Theme of the day? Impromptu dental work. Kids, don’t try this at home.The films are pretty restrained, on a number of levels. I notice they don’t try...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Autopsy
Another in the generically named series, this was probably our favorite movie of the day. It’s also misnamed: There are, in fact, no autopsies. This...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Perkins 14
Now, Crazy Eights + 75%! No, actually, this ends up with more of a Mulberry Street vibe, though it’s set in a small town, which is a lot easier to...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Slaughter
Inspired by true events. Few words strike fear into my heart than those. Usually it’s a poor substitute for a well-plotted movie with a lot of really...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: First thoughts
Ooh, I hope they’re not all super-vanilla type horrors. I like the different ones, even if they’re not great. Last year’s Mulberry Street was...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Dying Breed
Inbred hillbilly cannibals menace city folk.Sure, we’ve seen it before. But have we seen it in Tasmania? I think not! (Joe Bob Briggs is going to sue...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: Butterfly Effect: Revelation
I didn’t see the first Butterfly Effect due to my severe allergies to Ashton Kutcher. (I don’t know why. I barely know who the guy is. I’m probably...
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After Dark Horror Fest 3: From Within
A curse afflicts members of a small town, causing them to “commit suicide”. Crazy Christian community members decide to blame the local witches.Sure,...
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Torture Porn
“Torture Porn” is most commonly a phrase applied to a movie the critic applying it didn’t like, regardless of merit (cf. The Passion of the Christ)....
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Cinematic Titanic Docks At Frankenstein's Castle Of Freaks
The latest CT is here! This time it’s the 1974 Italian horror flick Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks that’s up for mocking. You may recall that we...
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Doubt
I am, for the most part, not inclined to look at movies through a particular political filter. Let’s say, for example, there’s a movie about an evil...
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Betsy Russel Gets A Cramp
I was looking through my site referrals and discovered the maelstrom comes up first if you Google:betsy russell i’ve got a cramp private schoolI...
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Role Models
I’ve started and stopped this review so many times, I can’t remember if I, in fact, already did review it. It’s mostly the holiday season and...
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Ride of Die Walküre
I was on the fence about seeing the new Tom Cruise movie Valkyrie. I’m kind of on the fence about Cruise, and not just because the one time I saw...
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Moscow, Belgium
I told The Boy when we left the theater that he could probably claim to be the only 13-year-old American boy to see the Belgian-made Dutch-language...
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Let The Right One In
It’s hard being twelve. Being Swedish probably doesn’t help, with the long, dark winters and constant snowfall. Being a smaller kid with an absentee...
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Who Wants To Be A Slumdog Millionaire?
When we’re first introduced to Jamal Malik, he has been winning on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” and the police are torturing...
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Zack And Miri Make A Porno
Toward the end of his career, Blake Edwards made a bunch of comedies that were widely regarded as not as good as the films he had made previously....
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Rachel Getting Married
While Jonathan Demme is best known for Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, this Roger Corman alumnus has a broad and diverse resume. Which is...
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The Boy In The Striped Pajamas
As mentioned previously, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was sold out Saturday evening when The Boy suddenly up and decided he wanted to go see...
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Cinematic Titanic: Santa Claus Conquers The Martians (again)
There are many great episodes of “Mystery Science Theater 3000”. There are some, however, that stand out. Manos, The Hands of Fate, for example....
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Sidney White and the Seven Dorks
Revenge of the Nerds meets Snow White. You just know that’s how the Amanda Bynes vehicle Sydney White was pitched. What’s interesting is that the...
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Bond: A Small Amount of Comfort
Quantum used to be used to mean a small amount. Really. I’m just positive. Somewhere in the ‘80s it started to be used to mean a large amount, as in,...
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Madagascar 2: Back To The Box Office
Of course, the real problem with these Dreamworks movies is I sit there going “Who is that? Is that…?”It’s Alec Baldwin this time. He’s the evil lion...
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RocknRollan on the River
The thing about these English gangster flicks is that it takes a while for the ol’ ears to adjust to the myriad accents and quaint sayings and slang...
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Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-changeling
I love me some Clint Eastwood. Acting, sure. An archetype. But behind the camera? Awesome.Also, the guy is 78 and has two movies in the hopper, one...
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Saw V: I Want To Play A Game (but I get to be the shoe)
We went to Saw V last night–would’ve gone sooner but we went with a buddy of mine and his wife, who are difficult to schedule.The Saw series, at its...
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Body of Uneven Movies
Ridley Scott is probably one of our great directors; it’s rather a shame he doesn’t make better movies. That’s a terrible thing to say, isn’t it? But...
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Kiss Me Deadly
I’m not really familiar with Mickey Spillane’s work, being more a Hammett or Chandler guy myself. I rather liked the short-lived ‘80s series with...
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Q is for Quarantine
A few months ago I mocked an article lamenting the state of the horror movie, and pointing to the Spanish-language films The Orphanage and Rec as...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Gas-s-s-s
There are many endings. On the one hand, it’s arguable that I’ve never seen Gas-s-s-s because I’ve only ever seen it on commercial TV, and the last...
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Appaloosa
There’s a scene in Unforgiven where Clint Eastwood talks about how, rather than straight gunfights in the street, assassins were more likely to shoot...
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Movies Spoofed In Airplane!
I’ve noticed that the modern Airplane!-style movies are pretty much non-stop references to other (often far, far better and even funnier) movies. But...
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Cinematic Titanic's Legacy of Blood
Episode 4 of the new riff delivery system that is Cinematic Titanic was made available for download yesterday, and I dutifully downloaded from EZ...
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As If I Needed Lessons
How To Lose Friends and Alienate People is the second movie in as many weeks that seems to illustrate the rather large indifference of the American...
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An American Carol: Fa la la la la, la la la la
Hectic weekend that it was, I was glad to get out of the house for a bit to the movies, and did go–with much trepidation to see Zucker’s An American...
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"This cat knows something!"
So says Robert Montgomery in Mr. & Mrs. Smith–the 1941 Hitchcock screwball comedy, not the weird Pitt/Jolie action comedy of 2005.The woman...
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"You can trust me. I'm a dentist."
I think Ghost Town is officially a flop. It barely cracked the top 10 in a weak week last, uh, week, and has completely dropped off the charts over...
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Frozen River: Slurpees Half Price
Melissa Leo is in a big budget picture out now alongisde mega-uber-super-duper-screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. But you could probably...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: The Last Woman On Earth
One of Roger Corman’s favorite budget-saving tricks was to film two movies while on location instead of one. The second film was done on a...
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Waitress, On Reflection
Adrienne Shelley’s Waitress has been on cable quite a bit, and I’ve had a chance to re-view it.When it first came out, Althouse hated it. I think I...
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On The Importance of Being Earnest
Not the Oscar Wilde play but the actual importance of being earnest.I was thinking about why I find Ed Wood watchable. And then about how I find the...
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Burn After Reading. Then Eat The Ashes.
You could divide the movies of Joel and Ethan Coen into two categories: Tragedies and comedies. You could almost adhere to the classic definition of...
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Pleasantville with Zombies
Even here in La-La Land, not every movie gets a shot in the theaters, and sometimes the ones that do get a shot get just a few days. And yet, I’m...
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The Chick Flick: Causes and Cures
I was going to write about “chick flicks” when I realized I already had, on New Years Eve Day, no less.But the remake of The Women brought up an...
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The Dark Knight Returned
I saw The Dark Knight again.My original review, from six weeks ago is here. Some observations upon reflection:It holds up rather well.It’s at #3 on...
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Man on Wire: Audience on Seat Edge
Narcissism and nostalgia, would be my bullet summary of Man on Wire, the documentary of Philippe Petit’s crossing of the World Trade Center on a...
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Traitor In Trange Land
The Boy opted for the new Don Cheadle movie over the documentary about the guy who tightrope walked across the World Trade Center, and since he had...
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Manic Monday Apocalypso: Introduction
I thought it would be fun to start every week off with some sort of post-apocalyptic topic.Nothing like a little doom-and-gloom to cure that “case of...
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Movie Post Mortem: Evan Almighty
I avoided Evan Almighty when it was in the theaters because it had less than stellar reviews and a bad IMDB rating. Too much about it should’ve sent...
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Tropic Thunder: Tenacious Iron Zoolander!
Comedians are often the hardest working guys in show business.You may not like Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell, Owen Wilson, Jack Black or Ben Stiller, but...
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TransSiberian: Like TransAmerica, minus the gender reassignment
A stable, staid couple hooks up with a wilder one causing havoc in their otherwise ordinary lives. Sure, we’ve seen it before, but have we ever seen...
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Bottle Shock: "It's just that I'm British...and you're not."
‘Why don’t I like you?“"Because you think I’m an ass. And I’m not really. It’s just that I’m British…and you’re not. ”If there’s a danger in Randall...
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Mirrors, The Playthings of Men's Vanity
I was not particularly optimistic about seeing Mirrors, the latest Asian horror remade American-style, but the initial buzz was pretty good and, as...
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How About a Nice Pineapple Express?
From the guys who brought you Superbad, as the tag line goes, comes another film which curiously blends ‘00s sensibilities with a '70s feel. What is...
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Cinematic Titanic Stings The Wasp Woman
The first fifteen minutes of this is blazingly funny. Non-stop, high-octane riffing. (Actually, the last fifteen minutes is also terrific. And the...
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Tell No One (Ne le dis à personne)
Margot and Alex are childhood sweethearts (ignore that there’s 15 years age difference between them) who grow up to be a happily married couple,...
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Smart Gits
Get Smart was still playing and a movie was needed. The new Mummy flick doesn’t look too good, and 3-D doesn’t work for me, ruling out the other...
Reprint: This Film Is Not Yet RatedI
Lori Ingham (a very cool blogger indeed) stopped by the Bubba Ho-Tep thread to praise it and while browsing her many blogs, I came across a positive...
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Fractured Plot
SPOILERS about Fracture forthwith, in the form of questions:Why the hell didn’t our high-powered lawyer (played by Ryan Gosling, who’s so distraught...
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Fractured Eardrums
We watched Fracture yesterday, a film I had avoided in the theaters due to its alleged mediocrity. (It is fairly mediocre, but before you see a...
A Man Named Pearl
The documentary-as-hagiography without a political end is a neglected genre. I say this non-facetiously. A lot of people have done really cool...
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Baghead (Not A Story Of A Trooper York 3AM Date)
There’s some well-worn ground in the new little flick Baghead. Four actors who long for bigger and better careers are inspired after watching a...
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The Dark Knight Consterns
Batman Begins has the distinction of being the first Batman movie that isn’t even a little camp. The Batman has a particularly checkered past–which...
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Top 10 Post Apocalyptic Movies and TV Shows
Good Post Apocalyptic movies are rare. Every dime store wannabe Roger Corman (including Roger Corman) makes a post-apocalyptic movie because it’s...
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Why Didn't I Hate Wall-E?
I saw Wall-E again, and was wondering to myself why I didn’t hate it. (This actually triggered a long rant on the nature of multiple viewings, but...
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Trumbo: First Blood Part II
Trumbo! Ed Driscoll does a video commentary on the new documentary, pointing out that the movie never says whether Trumbo actually was a member of...
Hellboy 2: The Golden Director
I’ve liked Guillermo Del Toro since the dubious but strikingly visual Mimic. Directors who make more of the material than is actually there impress...
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Riki Tiki Trumbo
For a brief shining moment in the ‘50s, anti-communist groups ran rough-shod over the Constitution and engaged in ineffective attempts to identify...
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Pixar Conquers The Universe
The real problem with Wall-E is that it can’t possibly live up to expectations, can it?Maybe. Right now, this latest flick from Pixar is hovering in...
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Go, Live and Become
We were going to try to hit the free showing of Live and Become at the locale Laemmele but it’s basketball season again for The Flower and that tends...
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Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs
Along with the new Cinematic Titanic, Matt Groening, David X. Cohen and company have released the second of the Futurama movies this week.Massively...
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Cinematic Titanic Sinks Again! The Doomsday Machine
Update and bump: See the comments for more information on Rifftrax, which I may have misrepresented in my description. Conor from RT sets me...
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Kung Fu Panda Express
The Flower wanted to see Kung Fu Panda and, though The Boy had resisted it, he came along with us. We had dinner out first which is always fun. I’m...
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Incredibly, New Hulk Gets It Right
Sometimes I feel like an Ang Lee apologist and I’m not really sure why. Sense and Sensibility was a great film, but it was material that was...
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Indiana Jones and the Walker of Impending Mortality
I am precisely the wrong sort of person to gauge the relative merits of the new Indiana Jones movie relative to the others. (Also, Star Wars.) When I...
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Son of Rambow
In a forehead slapping moment half-way through Son of Rambow, a character pulls out a cell-phone the size of a toaster, and I realized it took place...
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Refuseniks
So, The Boy and I ended up doing a double-feature last week of two movies that weren’t going to be around after the Friday turnover. The first movie...
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Strangers In A Familiar Land
Update for Ace of Spadesers: Thanks for clicking through and thanks to Ace for the link. You can click on the poorly maintained “reviews” keyword...
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Pride before "The Fall"
I’ve compared Tarsem’s mixedly-reviewed film The Cell to one of my low budget favorites, Huyck and Katz’s Dead People. (Huyck and Katz would later go...
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Rockin' Past The Graveyard
I would have predicted that Young At Heart would be the big indie movie this summer. Old people singing edgy rock songs? How can that not be fun?But...
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Prince Caspian
The onward march of the film-izations of the C.S. Lewis Narnia series proceeds, somewhat sluggishly, with the second film Prince Caspian, released...
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Before The Rains
A series of domestic disasters propelled me to the theater for a late night showing of Before The Rains.Two words: Merchant-IvoryOr is that one...
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The Visitor
OK, so, the trailers look pretty hackneyed: An old white man is taught to enjoy life through the transformational power of music by an immigrant...
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Redbelt
Back in the day, I was a martial artist. I worked hard at it, and it was probably the only non-familial group I’ve ever really felt strong bonds...
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Priceless (Hors de Prix)
I hadn’t seen an Audrey Tatou movie since A Very Long Engagement and I wasn’t actually champing at the bit to see this one. But we were desperate,...
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I. Am. (Fe) Man.
All right, everyone’s on about the new superhero movie Iron Man and I actually did go to see it opening weekend (rare for me, but it was the only...
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Forbidden Kingdom
Jackie Chan has been trying to crack the US market for almost three decades, now. The funny-man made the best decision of his life when he threw off...
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Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Judd Apatow has a knack for producing films with familiar themes that nonetheless take new angles. Knocked Up is basically a romantic comedy with the...
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The Ruins
So, out of desperation, we picked the movie that seemed the least likely to suck, and that movie was the Mayan-based horror flick The Ruins. Written...
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Mammoth-ries?
Regular readers (both of you) will know I’ve decided to defy the demand for pointy breasts, last week with Jane Russell’s magnificence(s), and this...
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The Other Adam Carolla Project: The Hammer
If you don’t like Adam Carolla, you can stop reading this now. Seriously, there’s nothing here for you.I’ve found Mr. Carolla amusing since his...
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An Elephant For All Seasons
The primary problem with converting Dr. Seuss into a feature length film is that Seuss’s stories are a distillate of the very essence of drama: A...
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The Bank Job
I wonder if Jason Statham gets tired of playing roguish burglars and assassins. If so, that’s too bad, since three of his next four films have him...
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The Band's Visit
One of my favorite comedies of recent years is the German film Schulze Gets The Blues. It’s not for everyone: It’s statically filmed, slow-paced and,...
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Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day
I often ruminate on how the screwball comedies of the ‘30s and '40s can’t be recreated in modern times. I’ve always assumed they couldn’t be redone...
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Grindhouse: Death Proof redux
Oh, yeah. Way too long. It’s 35 minutes before the first car scene, which is, like, five minutes, and then there’s 50 more minutes to go. 15 minutes...
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Grindhouse: Planet Terror Redux
I didn’t take The Boy with me to see Grindhouse when it came out since I wasn’t sure it was appropriate (and it probably wasn’t at the time). Also, I...
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Hell is an eternity In Bruges?
In Bruges is my kind of movie. Like Drop Dead Gorgeous, Very Bad Things, Wrong Is Right, Harold and Maude, S.O.B. and the original Wicker Man, it...
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Savages You Can Count On
In 2007’s The Savages, Laura Linney turns in an Oscar-nominated performance of Kenneth Longergan’s Oscar-nominated screenplay about a sister whose...
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Die Mönefachers: The Counterfeiters
Die Fälscher won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language picture and happens to be the only one of the nominees to actually make it to a local...
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Juno, Romanian Style
I went to see the Romanian flick 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days before if vanished from the local cinema. I didn’t take The Boy. He already hates...
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The Diving Bell in the Sea Inside
I can’t help it. Mar adentro was my favorite film of 2004, so naturally, when I see another movie about a paralyzed guy, I’m going to compare. (I...
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Cloverfield: Gojira Redux
I don’t rush out to see (or quickly post reviews of) the big movies. You can get that lots of other places. Unlike, say, my keen insight on the...
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The Kickboxer vs. The Mime
Back in the glory days of the teen slasher and the martial arts film, someone got a wonderful idea. A wonderful, awful idea. “Let us marry,” they...
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Persepolis: Another Movie About The Suckitude In The Middle/Far East
But wait! This one is animated.And, actually, that’s an important starting consideration. Low budget animation can be very hard to watch. (Check out...
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Oil Milkshakes
There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s latest Oscar-ticket item came to our local Laemmle this week.If you’re not a Paul Anderson fan (Boogie...
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Kicking The Bucket List
Actually, I’m not gonna kick The Bucket List at all. As the credits rolled last night, I was shocked: I just saw a good Rob Reiner movie! A new one!I...
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The Kite Runner
I was actually not really amped to see this tale of Afghani woe called The Kite Runner. But, in my own defense, I didn’t know that it was directed by...
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Cinematic Titanic Sinks The Oozing Skull
Well, it finally arrived. And…? And…?Well, it’s been 20 years about since the Satellite of Love launched. Our beloved crew is older, wiser, and...
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Forgotten Gems: Turnabout
I run hot and cold on comedy legend Hal Roach. Well, not on him, per se. He seems like he was a helluva guy, working hard for the better part of four...
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El Orfanato: The Orphanarium
We decided to take a break from the award-bait movies today and went instead to see Guillermo Del Toro Presents some other spanish dude’s movie El...
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Juno. Not like the city in Alaska.
I caught Juno finally the other night. The writer, Diablo Cody, had a sort-of sex blog for years, which was vulgar and funny, and one of the first...
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What did I do deserve this? (A review of Atonement.)
When I first saw Joe Wright’s take on that old Austen warhorse, Pride and Prejudice, I thought it was a fun angle on something that had been done the...
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Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Me: I thought “Apocalypse” was pretty good for a “Resident Evil” movie.The Boy: Yeah. A bit silly though. Wouldn’t corporations be the best chance of...
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A Paean To Sexual Harrassment: Charlie Wilson's War
Just got back from Charlie Wilson’s War. (And hang tight, there are about eight movies out on my “to see” list–after weeks of scratching to find one...
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Speaking of Good Looking Old Folks....
I managed to catch Away From Her as it began it’s pre-awards rounds this week. (These things seem to go in curious streaks, don’t they? There was an...
Statuette Hunting
In honor of Christopher Plummer's passing, I thought I would repost a review of a movie he made nearly fifteen years that nobody saw. For reviews of...
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Gore-illas In "The Mist"
OK, lame title. “The Mist” isn’t all that gory. And what’s an “illa” anyway?That aside, I have to wonder if it’s hard being Frank Darabont. Since...
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Two Hours In The Uncanny Valley
At the behest of my partner-in-crime, Loaded Questions Kelly, I went to see Beowulf. There’s a theory called The Uncanny Valley that is applicable...
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After Dark 2007: Redux
Well, that sums up the eight movies.Eight movies in three days. Eight horror movies in three days. I wonder why I do it to myself.I’m glad the After...
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After Dark 2007: Crazy Eights
Crazy Eights The last movie we saw was probably the biggest budget flick. Not for any special effects but for name actors. Frank Whaley, Traci Lords,...
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After Dark 2007: Tooth & Nail
I love a good post-Apocalyptic thriller. It’s too bad one’s never been made. No, no, there are a few—very few—classics of the genre, but mostly...
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After Dark 2007: Nightmare Man
Nigthmare Man The home stretch of our festival experience began with Rolfe Kanefsky’s Nightmare Man, probably the lowest budget feature after...
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After Dark 2007: Borderlands
Borderlands We closed the first night with one of my least favorite genres: The crazy cult coming to cill, er, kill you genre. These were big in the...
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After Dark 2007: Lake Dead
Lake Dead American Gothic minus Rod Steiger and Yvonne DeCarlo. That’s the short form, anyway. Last year, the first movie I saw at the horror fest...
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After Dark 2007: Mulberry Street
Mulberry Street “By the numbers” was probably the watchword for Day 2. Our second film, Mulberry Street, was a by-the-numbers modern zombie flick,...
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After Dark 2007: Unearthed
Unearthed Oh, won’t someone free the horror movie alien from the grip of H.R. Giger? Ever since Ridley Scott’s seminal 1979 film, Alien, it seems...
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After Dark 2007: The Deaths of Ian Stone
The Deaths of Ian Stone Probably my favorite premise of the festival: A man is killed by some sort of crazies/monsters, then wakes up in a new life,...
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Gone Baby Gone
Lost somewhere in the, uh, maelstrom that was “Bennifer”, that was the alcohol abuse treatment, that was the uneven acting performances, the...
The Rape of Europa
In the third film of our documentary-thon, we saw The Rape of Europa, a feature based on Lynn Nicholas’ book of the same name. The source material. I...
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In The Shadow of the Moon
The next documentary I saw after the highly engaging and amusing King of Kong was In The Shadow of the Moon. If the former was about a handful of...
The Kings of Two Worlds
Two documentaries recently released demonstrate what I consider to be good movie-making while using two different and honest approaches to their...