Its joke is that Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell, Hope Springs) and Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi, TV’s Boardwalk Empire) are improbably coiffed stage magicians in Vegas à la Siegfried & Roy, but without the tigers. As glitzy and showy as they are painfully unhip, the two friends have been working together for 30 years, but a […]
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Posted inArts & Culture
Come Out and Play
Francis (Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Lola Versus) and the very pregnant Beth (the genetically blessed Vinessa Shaw, Side Effects) rent a boat to explore the nearby island of Punta Hueca (can’t-be-accidental translation: Hollow Point). Under a sweltering sun, they find a few kids at the dock and seemingly no else along the village’s roads or in its […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Jack the Giant Slayer
The film’s fatal mistake? Perhaps it was director Bryan Singer embracing the 19th-century nature of the story as tightly as he did Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for his own Superman Returns. These days, to satisfy family audiences, it’s evidently not enough to revive an old-fashioned tale; you have to hip it up with nods […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Anatomy / Anatomy 2
As Paula quickly discovers through her studies, there exists a crazy, frat-like organization on campus whose members like to perform autopsies. What’s so crazy about that? The surgeons of this secret society like to perform said autopsies on live humans. Naturally, that results in danger for her and creepy imagery for us. Slick, sick and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
6 Souls
See, he’s not your everyday schizophrenic, but a supernatural one, playing host to a half-dozen souls (hence the title) sharing one common thread: They were murdered. It’s an intriguing idea, and for a while, co-directors Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein (Underworld: Awakening) do it justice. Alas, it cannot last. Once the story moves into the […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The Monk
Oh, well. Seeing the new film adaptation makes me feel as if I have. Obviously, I can’t speak to how closely it may or may not adhere to the book, but director Dominik Moll’s The Monk definitely is rich in its Gothic trappings. To me, that alone is a huge plus. In 16th-century Madrid, […]
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The Last Exorcism Part II
She even gets a job cleaning hotel rooms and attracts the eye of a boy who works there (Spencer Treat Clark, 2009’s The Last House on the Left remake). But she can’t escape everything — namely, the demon still inside her. Still produced in part by Eli Roth (Hostel) but directed by new blood Ed […]
Posted inMusic
Kanye West — Yeezus
Ego alone isn’t what makes Mr. West such a fascinating figure; any other schmo with a head his size would be scoffed and discarded as parody. There’s actually a certain degree of legitimacy that keeps his maniacal sense of self-importance from devolving into full-scale megalomania: that Kanye’s vision and production chops are currently unmatched in […]
Posted inArts & Culture
The East
If you’ve seen one, you haven’t seen them all. But you should, and The East opens Friday exclusively at AMC Quail Springs Mall 24, 2501 W. Memorial. The title refers to an underground group of ecological terrorists led by the scruffy Benji (Alexander Skarsgård, TV’s True Blood). He and his followers — most notably Izzy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
This Is the End
I wasted so much of my 20s hanging out with these 420-types, sitting bored in their thrift-store-furnished living rooms, desperately looking at my watch while the person who was usually my ride sank deeper and deeper into the couch as the thick whiffs of chronic sunk deeper and deeper into their lungs. They were all […]