Gary Bond (Zulu) works wonders as John Grant, the only teacher in the Australian desert town of Tiboonda, where the tiny, single-room schoolhouse is surrounded by sand and dust. On Christmas break, Grant heads for Sydney, but must spend a night in Bundanyabba before catching a flight the next morning. At least that’s the plan. […]
nudity
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The Loneliest Planet
It’s curious that the Internet Movie Database has classified The Loneliest Planet as a “thriller,” since the film forgoes not just all that genre’s trappings, but narrative altogether. Forty-nine minutes pass before an act of what passes for conflict occurs. Ironically, doing so further slows a glacial pace. The existential Western Meek’s Cutoff looks like […]
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Hope Springs
Not without extreme difficulty, she somehow persuades Arnold to visit a marriage counselor (a misused Steve Carell, Crazy, Stupid, Love.) in another town for a week of intensive therapy — good for their relationship, bad for the viewer, for whom it feels like sitting in sessions in real time. At nights, in their room at […]
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The Inbetweeners Movie
Freshly graduated from high school and donning custom-made “Pussay Patrol” T-shirts, the four venture to the coastal Crete town of Malia for two weeks of constant drinking and, with luck, shagging. As uninspired as that setup is, it allows England to prove it can make teen comedies as unfunny as we Americans. As one expects, […]
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Sleep Tight
His only joy in life is waking up next to the beautiful, young Clara (Marta Etura, The Impossible). Too bad she’s not conscious of such a relationship — and quite literally. He abuses his access to apartments by hiding under her bed and waiting for her to fall asleep, whereupon he dons a surgical mask, […]
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Dick Tracy
As its director, producer and star, Beatty aimed to translate Chester Gould’s iconic comic strip from the funny pages to the silver screen, and he did that wonderfully – with the help of its Oscar-winning production design and makeup effects, of course. The backlot artifice serves a purpose; the primary colors burst with wide-eyed appeal; […]
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Looper
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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Chiller: The Complete Television Series
And, as with any media in the omnibus format, some episodes clearly work better than others. The irony is that Chiller begins to find its footing as the hours click by, yet it’s all over and done with after five. The two-disc set contains the entire quintet of the supernatural stories. The first, “Prophecy,” […]
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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 […]