Venus in Fur, the latest from master filmmaker and convicted sex offender Roman Polanski, is more than meta: It’s meta meta.
cinema
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Film review: Earth to Echo
In cinema, there is a fine line separating homage from imitation. Unquestionably, family-friendly sci-fi flick Earth to Echo is the latter.
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Knights of Badassdom
Too bad, because it starts quite well, as ambition-less auto mechanic Joe (Ryan Kwanten, TV’s True Blood) is dumped by his too-good-for-him girlfriend. To pick Joe up out of his doldrums, his housemates and best buds (played by Dallas Buyers Club‘s Steve Zahn and Peter Dinklage of TV’s Game of Thrones) get him high and […]
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Confession of Murder
Du-sok can do this without worry of imprisonment because, unlike these United States, the statute of limitations has run out. He’s a free man even after taking credit for most heinous deeds. Naturally, that irritates the case’s lead detective, Lt. Choi (Jung Jae-Young), whose run-in with the killer a decade ago left the policeman with […]
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Iron Sky: Director’s Cut
The Nazis mistake the landing as a prelude to an invasion, so the Third Reich prepares to strike the earth before the earth can strike it. Iron Sky has all the makings of a big batch of poor taste. Instead, it’s an inspired goof of a spoof that bridges the worlds of highbrow and lowbrow […]
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The Swimmer
At once allegorical and existential, Frank Perry’s film follows tan-and-tone Ned Merrill (Lancaster, Field of Dreams) as he embarks on a countywide trip home via the swimming pools of his upturned-nosed neighbors. As he dips from lavish house to lavish house, visiting friends and lovers past and present, we learn more and more about Ned’s […]
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The Wolf of Wall Street
As he did with the mob in 1990’s Goodfellas and with the gambling world in 1995’s Casino, Scorsese again grants us an epic peek at another world’s process; in this case, Wall Street’s repeated fleecing of Main Street. It’s yet another Scorsese masterpiece. Leonardo DiCaprio never has been better — and that’s really saying something […]
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Return to Nuke ‘Em High
Usually, Troma can offend with simple scoops of sex and violence and gore; here, director/iconoclast Lloyd Kaufman realizes lesbian couplings can’t serve as his ceiling, so the script includes bad-taste jokes related to James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Jerry Sandusky and Trayvon Martin. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t laugh during the movie — just […]
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Gravity
That said, it’s a must-own Blu-ray, and the bigger the TV you have, the better. Rightly the recipient of seven Academy Awards earlier this month, Gravity quickly gets rolling, with U.S. astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney, The Monuments Men) and scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock, The Heat) left to their own devices — and possibly […]
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Beneath
The effort he gives Beneath makes the Chiller Films presentation better than your average made-for-TV monster movie — or below-average, in the recent case of Hypothermia, a similar film in which Fessenden appeared. To the teens of Beneath stranded on a boat in the supposedly cursed Black Lake, a killer fish provides the fatal threat — not a […]