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 […]
dramedy
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Girl Most Likely
One of them, Bridesmaids star/scribe Kristen Wiig plays Imogene, a magazine writer in New York City so down over being dumped by her longtime boyfriend that she concocts a faked suicide attempt in order to win him back. Unfortunately, her sitcom premise backfires, forcing her to move in with her estranged mother, Zelda (Annette Bening, […]
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The Kings of Summer
Socially awkward and undersized classmate Biaggio (Moises Arias, TV’s Hannah Montana) comes along just for something to do, but the machete he brings along sure does come in handy. Although he indulges in shots of super-slow-motion too often, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (TV’s Funny or Die Presents …) ably recaptures that feeling of when summer […]
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Starbuck
The equally shlubby Patrick Huard plays David, a middle-aged man with no ambition who seems perfectly content delivering meat for his family’s butcher shop, even if he’s not very good at it. He’s $80,000 in debt; his ex-girlfriend (Julie LeBreton) has announced she’s pregnant with his child; and, worst of all, his past years of […]
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Save the Date
Not quite a pure drama, not quite a pure comedy, the scrappy charmer also is a love triangle sharing a point with a love rectangle, both hinging on Sarah (Lizzy Caplan, Bachelorette), an artist and bookstore manager who takes the plunge by moving in with her rocker boyfriend, Kevin (Geoffrey Arend, Devil), but bails when […]
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Why Stop Now
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 […]
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Your Sister’s Sister
The film is scheduled to open Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial. Written and directed by Lynn Shelton over 12 days, Your Sister’s Sister is another indication of the ongoing mainstreaming of “mumblecore,” a quasi-film movement punctuated by improvisation, modest production values and, all too often, amateurish notions of storytelling. But […]
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A Bag of Hammers
Jason Ritter (The Perfect Family) and co-writer Jake Sandvig (Easy A) star as best buds Ben and Alan, two con men who make money off a valet-parking scheme. But other than that, they’re really nice guys. The axis of their felonious world shifts when they meet a boy who moves into the neighborhood with his […]
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Hysteria
Yeah, that kind of feel-good. Based on a true story and scheduled to open Friday at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, Hysteria unfolds in late 19th-century London — a time when modern medicine amounted to a jar of leeches, theories about germs were “poppycock,” and the plague of the era was hysteria among women. Per […]
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Wolf Head
Ryan “Staples” Scott just wanted to “do something funny, with guns.” “The image of a gun has so much more weight to it,” said the Yukon resident. “I wanted to create a plot to push that.” The end result is his directorial debut in feature filmmaking, “Wolf Head,” shot entirely in the Oklahoma City metro […]