Gooding is Ray Carver, a fixer who “solves” disputes between mob families. He also narrates from the start, so you know on whose side the movie stands; however, his softly spoken platitudes like “The past is the devil. You can’t run from it. It’s always behind you” put me squarely on the opposite side. Meanwhile, […]
nude
Posted inArts & Culture
The Moth Diaries
Told from the perspective of 16-year-old Becca (Sarah Bolger, The Spiderwick Chronicles, In America), it chronicles a year at Brangwyn, a private school for girls. With the help of her best friend, Lucie (Sarah Gadon, A Dangerous Method), Becca is just starting to cope with her father’s recent suicide as the semester begins. A new […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Elevator
Last year’s M. Night Shyamalan-produced Devil, right? Well, yes, but also the new-to-DVD Elevator. Whereas supernatural forces were to blame in Devil, the indie Elevator boasts something even more evil: mankind. Going up in a metal box to a corporate fundraising party are nine people, including:• the CEO (John Getz, The Social Network) and his […]
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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), […]
Posted inMusic
Forté’s forte
For some musicians, performing is work. For others, it’s just a big party. For Tulsa’s Fiawna Forté, it’s therapy. “I was a very shy child, and had a pretty rough childhood. I buried everything,” she said of her intense performance style. “Onstage, I’m taking every bad thing in my life and throwing it up, mentally […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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 […]
Posted inArts & Culture
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 […]