In the kind of one-note part that threatened to kill his career before the one-two punch of Zombieland and The Social Network saved it, Jesse Eisenberg stars as Eli, a young man with a bright future as a pianist ahead of him, if not for having to act as a surrogate father for his own […]
comedy
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Bolo
Bolo is a punch used by boxers — a wide, sweeping uppercut. It also is the title of Fall Films’ latest local production. We recommend skipping the former and taking the latter. With free beer from Titswiggle Brewing Co. and live music beforehand from local harpist Jessica Tate, Bolo premieres Saturday at City Arts Center. […]
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The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
The film fills in the details of Holmes’ three-year spell of assumed death — “Only the facts have been made up,” teases a title card — by pairing the great detective with the great psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. Arguably more notable is that Solution is the first dilated-pupils depiction of Holmes, the only to tackle head-on […]
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Hope Springs
Not without extreme difficulty, she somehow persuades Arnold to visit a marriage counselor (a misused Steve Carell, Crazy, Stupid, Love.) in another town for a week of intensive therapy — good for their relationship, bad for the viewer, for whom it feels like sitting in sessions in real time. At nights, in their room at […]
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The Inbetweeners Movie
Freshly graduated from high school and donning custom-made “Pussay Patrol” T-shirts, the four venture to the coastal Crete town of Malia for two weeks of constant drinking and, with luck, shagging. As uninspired as that setup is, it allows England to prove it can make teen comedies as unfunny as we Americans. As one expects, […]
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Girls: The Complete First Season
The result, Girls, generated instant millennial buzz — not all of it positive — and Emmy love. It may deal with the lives of four unmarried, 20-something women in New York City, but it’s no Sex and the City, and thank the stars above for that. One of its characters, the shy virgin played by […]
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Hitchcock
Hitchcock, which opens Friday, isn’t a bad movie; it’s just a baffling one. Purportedly about the making of 1960’s Psycho, it winds up a hodgepodge of old-fashioned biopic, bogus psychological thriller and simplistic domestic melodrama. The film, however, is hardly the work of incompetents. Director Sacha Gervasi has an absorbing rockumentary (Anvil: The Story of […]
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Elvira’s Movie Macabre: Mega Movie Marathon
Spanning nearly three decades of release, the movies included are Night of the Living Dead, I Eat Your Skin, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, The Werewolf of Washington, The Terror, Eegah!, Scared to Death, Tormented, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, The Manster, Lady Frankenstein and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. All reside in the public […]
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Funny business
Comedian Jay Mohr recently used his popular podcast, Mohr Stories, to call Brian Regan the funniest comedian in America. That was news to Regan. “I didn’t realize he said that, but I’m quite honored. That means a lot to me,” him said. “Compliments are always fun, but when they come from people who do what […]
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Big Tits Zombie
But I’ll give you several dozen more. Aoi plays Lena Jodo, the illiterate, chain-saw-wielding stripper heroine at the center of this unapologetic celebration of arterial spray and areola. As her club is being shut down, she and her fellow entertainers … wait, what’s that? I’m boring you? Apologies. How’s this instead: an old Asian midget, […]