Oh, and she’s preggo. It’s not his. That revelation causes Harry to bust through the glass that separates them so he can get his paws around her neck. It’s an indication that this not-so-ordinary crime tale intends to do the same to audiences. In its day, I’m sure it did, being the first British film […]
nudity
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Goats
Based on an assumedly semiautobiographical novel and well-directed by a member of the Coppola filmmaking dynasty — Christopher Neil, nephew of Francis — Goats centers on Ellis (Graham Phillips, TV’s The Good Wife), who leaves the remote Arizona desert home he shares with his trust-fund hippie mom (Vera Farmiga, Safe House) for a prestigious prep […]
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Drive-In
(How meta it would’ve been to see this at an actual drive-in; I’ll settle for its DVD debut from Sony Pictures’ Choice Collection, rather than the alternative, which is to never see it at all.) Like American Graffiti three years before it, the movie follows a select handful of youngsters, mostly teens, over the course […]
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For a Good Time, Call …
If you bet that means a lot of one-liners about penises and vaginas, and maybe some sight gags involving zeppelin-sized dildos, I congratulate you on your clairvoyance. But there are surprises here, too, particularly how sweet-natured this film actually is, and how winning are its two stars. Lauren (Lauren Anne Miller, 50/50), the straitlaced product […]
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The Crimson Petal and the White
Romola Garai (Atonement) plays Sugar, a 19-year-old prostitute pimped out by her own mother (The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson, almost unrecognizable) to the hoity-toity about town. One such uncool customer is William Rackham (O’Dowd), a soap titan married to a mentally ill woman (Amanda Hale, Bright Star). So taken is he by Sugar’s honeypot that he […]
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Killer Joe
The second collaboration between director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) and Tulsa-born playwright Tracy Letts — their first being 2006’s Bug — this work serves up trailer-trash noir as savage as it is savagely funny. Not that all audiences will get the joke. Letts’ first play rolls around in the muck, and Friedkin […]
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Naked Angels
The 1969 picture arrived at the crest of the biker-film craze, yet is so dull, it could’ve killed the genre. The plot concerns gang leader Mother (Michael Greene, The Harrad Experiment) being freshly discharged from the hospital, but in danger of going right back in as he seeks revenge on his rivals who put him […]
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Karate-Robo Zaborgar
As silly as it is satisfying, the Sushi Typhoon serving is both an update and a spoof of a live-action kiddie series from the 1970s, à la Ultraman, so the approach is both reverent and respectfully raunchy (think The Brady Bunch Movie). It’s about the love story between a man named Daimon (Yasuhisa Furuhara) and […]
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Mother’s Day
My younger brother picked up the box and asked to rent it; my mom refused, as a responsible parent should when presented with such an inquiry by a 9-year-old. I’m unsure what appealed to him: the disembodied head in a gift box or the recipient’s half-skull head? Whatever it was, it must’ve worked for a […]
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2 Days in New York
According to online language tools, the title Meet the Fockers roughly translates to Rencontrer les Fockers in French. I bring this up only because Parisian-born actress Julie Delpy (Before Sunset) essentially has made a French-flavored version of that comedy with 2 Days in New York, which she directed and co-wrote. 2 Days plays for exactly […]