In Looper, writer/director Rian Johnson crams in so many, it initially looks as if this sci-fi actioner might collapse under the weight of them all. Dystopian society, time travel, telekinesis, gangland killings — there are a lot of ground rules to keep track of here, much of them conveyed through the wobbly device of a […]
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Resident Evil: Retribution
After an exposition-filled prologue in which our heroine, Alice (Milla Jovovich, Dirty Girl), faces the audience to relay the events of the first four flicks, Retribution goes straight into a shameless rip-off of the much-lauded beginning of 2004’s Dawn of the Dead. This is far from the film’s only act of cribbing; look for direct […]
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This Is 40
Opening Friday, This Is 40 tickles the travails of being rich, white and smug. Maybe a grown-up comedy isn’t in the cards for Apatow, whose best works (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) celebrate arrested adolescence. His latest is a generally messy affair: often uproariously funny, but uneven, overlong, largely improvisational, packed with F-bombs and hobbled […]
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Django Unchained
The result is a brutal, bloody epic that hits theaters on Christmas Day. Happy birthday, Jesus! Paying homage to the Italian Django franchise birthed in 1966, Tarantino delivers what could serve as the origin story of the bounty hunter, if not for his Civil War-era setting and race-reversal casting. Jamie Foxx (Horrible Bosses) is enormously […]
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The Frozen
Mike knows Emma isn’t thrilled about the trip. What he doesn’t know is that she’s just found out she’s pregnant. That’s an issue they can deal with later, however; more pressing is that their snowmobile crashes, leaving them injured and no cell signal to call for help. Plus, it appears they are being followed. It’s […]
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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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Lawless
Reteaming with his unlikely Proposition screenwriter, Bad Seeds rocker Nick Cave, Hillcoat again delivers a quasi-Western with this true tale of the Prohibition-era’s bootlegging Bondurant brothers in Virginia, played by Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) and Shia LaBeouf (the Transformers trilogy). When Lawless begins, the Bondurant boys rule Franklin […]
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Deathtrap
Here, Caine stars as Sidney Bruhl, a playwright who has just suffered his fourth straight Broadway flop. Much to the dismay of his wife, Myra (Dyan Cannon, who appeared in an equally keep-’em-guessing film in 1973’s The Last of Sheila), his solution is to kill Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve), the former seminar student who has […]
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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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A Destructive Manner
Last seen this summer in the romantic comedy Mickey and Me, local filmmaker Mickey Reece and his Fall Films repertory company return with a dramatic thriller in A Destructive Manner. This time, however, directorial duties have ceded to the hands of two of his players, James Paulsgrove and Dallos Paz, and Reece takes center stage […]