The great William Atherton, the reigning sleazeball of ’80s movies from Ghostbusters to Die Hard, plays a greedy developer breaking ground on a premiere beach club and spa near the New Jersey boardwalk. The underwater drilling — illegal, of course — unleashes a school of CGI albino sharks, just in time for the big Fourth […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Penumbra
That sounds too good to be true, but stranger things have happened on the day of a total solar eclipse. And they will. Too bad Penumbra takes a full 51 minutes of its 90 to get near there. Only then does the Argentinian film approach any plot points that reveal themselves as thriller-esque. Before then […]
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Lovely Molly
The film opens with a deeply distraught Molly (newcomer Gretchen Lodge, in a fearless, go-for-broke debut) recording herself on Oct. 16, 2011, saying, “Whatever has happened, it wasn’t me.” Immediately, we jump back to “whatever.” Married just 13 months earlier, mall janitor Molly and her level-headed truck-driver hubby, Tim (Johnny Lewis, TV’s Sons of Anarchy), […]
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Forbidden love
Credit: Brad Gregg It’s fair to say the love story of Ernest W. Marland and Lydie Roberts could have given Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn a run for their money in the department of the thoroughly icky. The Weinstein Company is set to make Ends of the Earth, a film dramatizing the tale of Marland […]
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ParaNorman
But while Coraline sustained a masterful level of Grimm-like creepiness, ParaNorman is only fitfully brilliant. The premise is promising. Eleven-year-old Norman Babcock (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee, Let Me In) has a familiar problem: He sees dead people. Lots of ’em, actually, which makes him something of a pariah in the hamlet of Blithe Hollow, Mass. […]
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Headhunters
Compared to the continent of Europe, the rate of death by guns in America is six times higher. You wouldn’t know it based on the current wave of crime films from that half of the globe. Arguably kicked off by the worldwide success of Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, the movies of […]
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Elena
Moral bankruptcy looms over Elena, a noir-ish Russian-language drama that screens Thursday through Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, but director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) would have us withhold judgment of the dreary, compromised characters he presents. In lengthy, often static shots, Zvyagintsev urges his audience to study every inch of the bleak […]
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Ruby Sparks
This changes when, at the urging of his shrink (Elliott Gould), Calvin writes about the young woman who wanders in and out of his slumber. The girl of his dreams literally becomes the girl of his dreams when she appears in his waking life, in his kitchen, as if they’re already a devoted couple. Her […]
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The Hunger Games
I also found it disappointing — not as a near-billion-dollar grosser, but as a movie purported to be both action and science fiction. It’s too inert for the former and not imaginative enough for the latter. The title references a brutal annual competition staged by the government of a dystopian future, of which this film’s […]
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Kill List
The less you know beforehand, the better, but know that Jay (Neil Maskell, Atonement, Doghouse) is stricken by immense stress. Struggling under the grips of the recession has placed his marriage to Shel (MyAnna Buring, The Descent, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 1) on shaky ground, and their verbal disagreements dampen the spirits […]