Sci-fi thriller Elysium thinks it’s a piquant social allegory about the undocumented population and fight for universal healthcare. But Neil Blomkamp’s sophomore outing (after 2009’s surprise critical hit District 9) is really just an empty B-movie actioner that has more in common with clunky,…
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The Spectacular Now is a remarkably sensitive teen movie, not exactly an oxymoron in American film but rare enough to take notice. Like last year’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, here is a movie about teenagers that honestly acknowledges and deals with the…
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As bad taste family road movies go, you could probably do worse (and certainly better) than We’re the Millers, a crude gag machine about a thirty-something Denver drug dealer who appropriates a fake cover family to cross the Mexican border and transport a payload…
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While a marked improvement over 2009’s forgettable X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Hugh Jackman’s latest outing—his 6th as the snarling, talon-fingered mutant Logan—is a middling picture, welcomely understated as summer action pictures go. But that doesn’t exactly make it good. Directed by James Mangold, the expert…
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James Wan’s splendidly creepy, first-class haunted house picture The Conjuring is a welcome throwback to a genre all but forgotten by Hollywood’s labored, modern CGI thrillers. Featuring expert craftsmanship that makes superlative use of light, darkness, sound and production design, The Conjuring is a high-order…
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There’s nothing new in World War Z, the reportedly troubled movie adaptation of Max Brooks’ zombie apocalypse novel, transformed here into a rousing action picture that plays like a mash up of 28 Days Later and Contagion. Yet capably directed by Marc Forster and…
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Richard Donner can relax. Charmless, soulless and assaultive, the misfire Man of Steel treads familiar ground—the origin of Superman and his battle with General Zod—replacing both the spirit and mythology of the icon with an angsty identity crisis and a lot of loud explosions…
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The East, a thought-provoking thriller about a secret agent that infiltrates an “eco-terrorist” faction targeting billion-dollar corporations culpable in some very dirty deeds, is a hell of a provocative picture, a spy movie that forces us to reexamine our notions of terrorism. Co-written by…
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Now You See Me is a movie with very little story or character, but a hell of a lot of plot and pizzazz. And that’s mostly okay in this piffle of a caper film, the kind of high-concept contemporary movie-movie that operates in a…
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It’s a very rare movie that presents a character you want, above all costs, to be happy. And What Maisie Knew, the moving new adaptation of Henry James’ 1897 novel of a young girl in peril, is such a film. In the center of a…
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