Too bad, because it starts quite well, as ambition-less auto mechanic Joe (Ryan Kwanten, TV’s True Blood) is dumped by his too-good-for-him girlfriend. To pick Joe up out of his doldrums, his housemates and best buds (played by Dallas Buyers Club‘s Steve Zahn and Peter Dinklage of TV’s Game of Thrones) get him high and […]
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Confession of Murder
Du-sok can do this without worry of imprisonment because, unlike these United States, the statute of limitations has run out. He’s a free man even after taking credit for most heinous deeds. Naturally, that irritates the case’s lead detective, Lt. Choi (Jung Jae-Young), whose run-in with the killer a decade ago left the policeman with […]
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Iron Sky: Director’s Cut
The Nazis mistake the landing as a prelude to an invasion, so the Third Reich prepares to strike the earth before the earth can strike it. Iron Sky has all the makings of a big batch of poor taste. Instead, it’s an inspired goof of a spoof that bridges the worlds of highbrow and lowbrow […]
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The Swimmer
At once allegorical and existential, Frank Perry’s film follows tan-and-tone Ned Merrill (Lancaster, Field of Dreams) as he embarks on a countywide trip home via the swimming pools of his upturned-nosed neighbors. As he dips from lavish house to lavish house, visiting friends and lovers past and present, we learn more and more about Ned’s […]
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The Wolf of Wall Street
As he did with the mob in 1990’s Goodfellas and with the gambling world in 1995’s Casino, Scorsese again grants us an epic peek at another world’s process; in this case, Wall Street’s repeated fleecing of Main Street. It’s yet another Scorsese masterpiece. Leonardo DiCaprio never has been better — and that’s really saying something […]
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Return to Nuke ‘Em High
Usually, Troma can offend with simple scoops of sex and violence and gore; here, director/iconoclast Lloyd Kaufman realizes lesbian couplings can’t serve as his ceiling, so the script includes bad-taste jokes related to James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Jerry Sandusky and Trayvon Martin. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t laugh during the movie — just […]
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Gravity
That said, it’s a must-own Blu-ray, and the bigger the TV you have, the better. Rightly the recipient of seven Academy Awards earlier this month, Gravity quickly gets rolling, with U.S. astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney, The Monuments Men) and scientist Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock, The Heat) left to their own devices — and possibly […]
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Beneath
The effort he gives Beneath makes the Chiller Films presentation better than your average made-for-TV monster movie — or below-average, in the recent case of Hypothermia, a similar film in which Fessenden appeared. To the teens of Beneath stranded on a boat in the supposedly cursed Black Lake, a killer fish provides the fatal threat — not a […]
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In Fear
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 […]
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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 […]