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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The 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)…
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Kathryn 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,…
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Quentin 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…
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The 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…
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Marion 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…
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The principal reason to see The Impossible is the herculean performance of Naomi Watts as a real-life wife and mother swept away in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, fighting to hang onto her life and family. In a film directed by the gifted Spanish…
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