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…
Read MoreWarm Bodies, Rest and Motion: Nicholas Hoult and Teresa Palmer Fall in Love, Heal the World in Winning Comic Zombie Love Story
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…
Read MoreThe worn out zombie genre gets a welcome reboot in the winning Warm Bodies, about a zombie and human who fall in love and—what else?— change the world. Based on the popular novel by Isaac Marion and directed by Jonathan Levine (The Wackness, 50/50)…
Read MoreJessica Chastain, the ubiquitous star of Zero Dark Thirty whose versatility apparently knows no bounds, stars in the new supernatural thriller Mama, an eerie ghost story that relies more on suggestion than visceral thrills. If it doesn’t exactly scare us, it certainly raises a…
Read MoreMichael Haneke’s Amour, the winner of last year’s Palm d’Or at Cannes, is a likely candidate for the most painful movie you might ever see. It’s a movie that looks at aging and death with such open-eyed, clinical precision, completely lacking in sentiment, that…
Read MoreKathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, about the decade-long hunt for and ultimate killing of Osama bin Laden, is an unmistakable masterpiece. It’s also a picture that does not reach out to us with character, sentiment or resolution – and is nonetheless an essential, thought-provoking,…
Read MoreQuentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is an explosion of violence and humor and delicious performances, a visceral and upsetting portrait of slavery that borders on blaxploitation at times, all wrapped up in a spaghetti western. It’s a movie so entertaining for each of its 164…
Read MoreThe screen version of the musical Les Misérables is pretty much what you would expect and a fairly straightforward adaptation of the beloved musical, itself adapted from Victor Hugo’s classic novel. As mounted by director Tom Hooper, the picture has the look, feel and thematic…
Read MoreMarion Cotillard, the world-class, Oscar winning actress whose tour de force in 2006’s La Vie En Rose made her an international movie star, plays a killer whale trainer maimed in an unfortunate accident in Rust and Bone, the sophomore picture from Jacques Audiard, whose…
Read MoreFamily Achieves The Impossible in Director Juan Antonio Bayona’s Tsunami Survival Story
You’ve never quite seen anything like the tsunami in director Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible, the true story of the 2004 Thailand catastrophe and how one family’s will to survive became an elemental force. The film, featuring Naomi Watts in a performance for the…
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