The Place Beyond the Pines, filmmaker Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to 2010’s Blue Valentine, is about the sins of fathers being visited on sons, fate and a particular kind of grittiness in the working class milieu of Schenectady, New York, depicted here as a dead…
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Much has been said about the supposed quality of the new Evil Dead picture, a remake of Sam Raimi’s crafty, 1981 low-budget chiller and drive-in mainstay, about twenty-somethings whose weekend cabin retreat results in demonic mayhem. Directed by first-time Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Martinez from…
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It’s not every day you find yourself chatting with the legendary Mitzi Gaynor, an entertainer bar none who, at 81, still has an ageless combination of wit, style, humor and, well, sizzle, that she had 55 years ago as kind-hearted romantic Ensign Nellie Forbush,…
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The not so fine line between satirizing and wallowing in excessive tits, ass and gunplay informs the wannabe provocation Spring Breakers, about four teenaged bimbos conquering South Florida in a hail of hedonism, or something like that. Written and directed by Harmony Korine (Gummo,…
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By all rights, The Call—starring Halle Berry as a frantically overpermed 911 operator trying to save the life of a kidnapped teen—shouldn’t have been this good. Featuring a committed performance from its star and shrewdly effective direction from indie filmmaker Brad Anderson (The Machinist,…
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As Sam Uley, the leader of The Twilight Saga’s feral—and uniformly handsome—wolf pack, actor Chaske Spencer has spent the better part of the last decade starring in one of the most popular film franchises of all time, a high-profile role requiring equal parts physique…
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The bombastic CGI spectacle Oz: The Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco as a two-bit Kansas magician circa 1905 who becomes an unlikely wizard, is a let-down, a movie so consumed by technology that its spirit gets crushed. A…
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The flower of evil grows within a teen girl in Stoker, a deliriously stylized psychological thriller from Korean director Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy), about some increasingly disturbing family dynamics that take root after the husband and father’s accidental death. But that’s not really what Stoker…
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January isn’t known for good movies, but Warm Bodies, the immensely appealing romantic comedy about a post-apocalypse where a melancholy zombie named “R” falls in love with a human girl named Julie, both lonely and looking for connection in isolated worlds, is a real…
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