After just two weeks of knowing one another, Tom (Iain De Caestecker, TV’s Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) asks Lucy (Alice Englert, Beautiful Creatures) to a fest in Ireland, but makes plans for nookie one night early by booking a room at a romantic hotel in the country. Driving to their destination, they get lost, failing […]
cinema
Posted inArts & Culture
Machine Head
What’s missing? A reason to care. Marlboro-throated Rachel (Sharon Hinnendael, star of the recent Embrace of the Vampire remake) and her fellow spoiled-brat friends spend spring break at a totally sweet Cali-desert house owned by some rich dude her dad knows. The girls lose their enthusiasm over a week of endless drinking and dicking when […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Homefront
The Stath plays ex-DEA agent Phil Broker, who when we first meet him, dons a Bad Wig Hall of Fame-worthy mullet for undercover work busting a Sons of Anarchy-esque biker gang / drug ring that ends in tragedy. Two years later, Broker is experiencing grief himself as a new widower. He and his 9-year-old […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Last Days on Mars
Lots, after fellow crew member (Goran Kostic, Taken) gets greedy enough to lay claim to finding life on Mars, in the form of a viral bacteria. To spill what happens next would spoil the surprise the film has up its well-padded sleeve; suffice to say, The Last Days on Mars has Alien‘s DNA all over […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Darkman
A very lanky and pale Liam Neeson (The Grey) portrays Peyton Westlake, a scientist working on creating synthetic skin, but can’t get it to last beyond 99 minutes. When his girlfriend (Moonrise Kingdom‘s Frances McDormand, who appears in a brand-new interview on the disc) stumbles onto a secret memo she shouldn’t have, corporate goons destroy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Armstrong Lie
The portion of truth he is telling, he’s doing only because he finally got caught, after a decade of bald-faced denials. Money corrupts, but it can’t buy everything, as Armstrong now knows — but has not yet learned. There exists a huge difference. No one should be surprised a very famous, very wealthy man got […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Past
Opening Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial Rd., The Past begins as Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) returns to Paris after four years to finalize a divorce with his estranged wife, Marie (Bérénice Bejo, The Artist). The ambivalence between them — an easy rapport pivoting to sniping and then back again — surfaces […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Philomena
Since the Oscar nominations were announced last month, gold-derby prognosticators have referred to Philomena as “the ninth nominee” in the Best Picture field. Their implication is that among all those films up for Hollywood’s highest honor, the British dramedy is the one least likely to win and least deserving of being there. That’s insane, of […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Haunter
Abigail Breslin (August: Osage County) stars as Lisa, a teen who’s the only one in her happy family of four to notice that for some reason, they’re re-living the same foggy Sunday in the ’80s over and over and over and over. Keeping her forever 15, it’s a cyclical grind of missing laundry, Atari Pac-Man, […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Escape Plan
The world of 2013, however, is a mighty different landscape; Escape Plan bombed. That’s too bad, because it’s pretty good for what it sets out to be: a big, dumb action movie, in the style of its stars’ big, dumb bread-and-butter recipe of yesteryear. Stallone’s Breslin works as a security expert hired to go undercover […]