Realizing that’s been done before, writer/director Padraig Reynolds shrewdly introduces a second storyline in the form of a $2 million kidnapping scheme concocted by a white-trash trio on a wealthy family. For these two storylines to converge takes about 50 minutes, and just before they do, Rites delivers a welcome twist. Well, it would be […]
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The Definitive Document of the Dead
By the film’s own opening-crawl admission, Document is intended as a teaching tool, so its nature is purposely freeform — and how! Narrated by the late Susan Tyrell (until the new sections), the film captures Romero and friends at work on 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, the now-classic sequel to 1968’s classic Night of the […]
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Zorro
Zorro movies always are better in theory than execution, but this is one of the more enjoyable efforts, because for once, the swashbuckling Spanish superhero is interpreted by the Italians. Therefore, the dish has a slight spaghetti-Western flavor. French screen idol Alain Delon (Le Samouraï) gallops into town as Don Diego, only to see his […]
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The Day
The film from director Douglas Aarniokoski (Highlander: Endgame) follows a group of young people wandering the country on foot several years after an event of catastrophic proportions. They include Shawn Ashmore (Frozen), Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism), Dominic Monaghan (TV’s Lost) and Shannyn Sossamon (One Missed Call), and they spend much of the movie in […]
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‘Thunderstruck”s strike two
Credit: Brad Gregg In the case of the Aug. 24 release, however, “theatrical experience” was nearly nonexistent. On an unreported production budget, its total domestic gross was a paltry $587,211, showing in only 250 theaters nationwide at its peak. At Rotten Tomatoes, the online barometer of critical favor (or lack thereof, as the case may […]
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Fred Won’t Move Out
Old age, a spouse suffering with dementia, grown children in the position of caring for their parents — these are tough, complicated themes in Fred Won’t Move Out, which screens Friday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. That might sound like emotionally exhausting stuff, but this small indie has a surprisingly light […]
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Smashed
Opening today exclusively at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial, the indie drama is reminiscent of 1988’s Clean and Sober, also a sturdy-enough addiction movie that lives and dies on its central performance — in other words, one actor shoulders the entire burden, elevating what is otherwise unremarkable (but not incompetent) material. He […]
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Lincoln
As if the subject alone isn’t worthy of adulation, it comes with a towering pedigree: Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan), Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be Blood) and a script by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner. To its credit, Lincoln has lengthy stretches in which it’s as absorbing as it wants to be. […]
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Frankenstein
And, in the early ’90s, he starred as the mad doctor in Frankenstein … for TNT, not Kenneth Branagh. Provided you missed it on during its CableACE Award-nominated broadcast, the better-than-average production is now alive — alive! — on MOD DVD from Warner Archive. Bergin’s Dr. Frankenstein is even more enterprising than in the Mary Shelley […]
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The Expendables 2
The remainder isn’t bad, either; in fact, it’s more fun than the 2010 original, while remaining every bit as big and dumb. Barney (Sylvester Stallone), Christmas (Jason Statham, Safe) and the rest of the Expendables are hired by Church (Bruce Willis) to retrieve a case from a downed plane in Russia. After doing so, they […]