Ever since the glory days of “Perry Mason,” I’ve been a sucker for stories about slick lawyers who live along the thin line of professional ethics, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. In “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey, “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”) skates along with one foot on the ethical side […]
Doug Bentin
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Jane Eyre
Starring Mia Wasikowska (“The Kids Are All Right”) as Jane, and Michael Fassbender (“Inglourious Basterds”) as Rochester, this new version emphasizes the novel’s Gothic elements: gloom, melancholy, suspicion and someone creeping through the halls of Thornfield Manor after dark. Director Cary Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre”) and screenwriter Moira Buffini (“Tamara Drewe”) provide an intensity of emotion […]
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Source Code
On a commuter train heading into Chicago, a young man jolts awake in the middle of a conversation with his girlfriend, Christina (Michelle Monaghan, “Due Date”), and clearly has no idea who she is, where he is or how he got there. He excuses himself to the restroom and doesn’t recognize the face in the […]
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The Lincoln Lawyer
In “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Mick Haller (Matthew McConaughey, “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past”) skates along with one foot on the ethical side and the other, not so much. Haller has no office, but operates out of his car’s backseat, hence the title. His clients tend to be on the lowlife side: bikers, hookers, dealers. A few […]
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Red Riding Hood
Your brain will function as it would if you’d been the guest of honor at the Zombie Family picnic last weekend. In this version — make that “perversion” — of the old fairy tale, Red’s name is actually Valerie (Amanda Seyfried, “Letters to Juliet”), which I’m sure was common in medieval Germany. Her village on […]
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Dogtooth
A family of five lives in isolation behind the walls of their well-groomed estate. Father drives into town every day to work, but he’s the only one who ever leaves. Mother has access to a telephone, kept hidden. The Eldest and Youngest, both daughters, and the Son stay home doing chores, swimming in the pool, […]
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Machete
No, I don’t mean we should go to the “bad part” of town and run the risk of being roughed up — I mean your couch, to watch “Machete,” from directors Robert Rodriguez and his frequent editor/now co-helmer Ethan Maniquis. <iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=oklahgazet-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B002ZG98CS&fc1=000000&IS2=1 Like Rodriguez’s half of “Grindhouse,” from which this film began as a fake […]
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The Tourist
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Alfred Hitchcock is dead. That doesn’t mean that he is no longer the master of suspense. “North by Northwest” will always be the exemplar of the lighthearted thriller in which an innocent man is mistakenly identified as someone else — someone with dangerous secrets — […]
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TRON: Legacy
You know, 1982 was a good year for science fiction films. We got Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and Disney’s “TRON.” Of course, the latter two were relative flops, although ”The Thing” went on to sci-fi superstardom, while a cult of unapologetic geeks took “TRON” to its bosom. None have spawned sequels until […]
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Gulliver’s Travels
I’ve been suspicious for some time, but now it’s official: I am tired of Jack Black’s overaged rocker shtick. Sorry, Jethro, but you can be too old to be a rock ’n’ roll doofus, and Black is. In “Gulliver’s Travels,” he brings that character to Jonathan Swift’s 1726 scathing satire, and the result makes little […]