Boris Rodriguez’s low-key Canadian comedy concerns Lars (Thure Lindhardt, TV’s The Borgias), who moves to a small town to become an art teacher at a tiny, underfunded school. Once was a gifted painter himself, Lars has been stuck in a 10-year creative rut. One of his students is Eddie (Dylan Scott Smith, 2012’s Total Recall), […]
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Welcome to the Punch
James McAvoy (Trance) is all frowns and glares as Max Lewinsky (kin to Monica?), a cop still pining three years later for the One Who Got Away — not a girl, but a criminal. Fleeing from the scene of a big score on motorcycle, robber Jacob Sternwood (Mark Strong, Zero Dark Thirty) managed to miss […]
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The Kentucky Fried Movie
Nothing more than a collection of roughly two dozen unrelated sketches, The Kentucky Fried Movie succeeds most at skewering its own medium: American commercial cinema. Fake trailers mock the exploitation fads of the era with Cleopatra Schwartz (blaxploitation), That’s Armageddon (disaster movies) and Catholic High School Girls in Trouble (youth sex films); they’re so dead-on, […]
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The Incredible Melting Man
TIMM (for short) continues his head-ripping rampage, leaving Geiger-equipped Dr. Ted Nelson (Burr DeBenning) to follow the putrid piles of the grubby, brown-red pus he drips everywhere, not to mention the occasional ear or eyeball. Basically, TIMM looks like he is using a Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready as a face mask. The movie is one of […]
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Black Rock
Like a gender-reversed Deliverance, three friends (Straw Dogs‘ Kate Bosworth, Childrens Hospital‘s Lake Bell and Aselton) motorboat to the titular isle for a gals-only camping trip. When three hunters cross their path, Abby (Aselton) spontaneously invites them to share their campfire and liquor. The guys accept, but after the very married Abby gets very drunk […]
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RED 2
Its inevitable successor, RED 2 (the acronym stands for “Retired, Extremely Dangerous,” per the comic-book source material), is, instead, a caricature of a caricature, one that revels in its lack of substance to the point of phlegmatic disinterest. The film revisits retired CIA agent Frank Moses (Bruce Willis, A Good Day to Die Hard), who, […]
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Detention of the Dead / The Demented
Imagine if zombies invaded The Breakfast Club. That’s literally the setup experienced by your stock-character students of the nerd, the jock, the misfit, the bully, the cheerleader and, so it’s not a total copy of the 1985 John Hughes classic, a wisecracking Asian kid (Justin Chon, 21 & Over) to spout things like, “I gotta […]
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Evil Dead
In Sam Raimi’s wildly original, wildly influential The Evil Dead of 1981, five friends into the woods for a cabin getaway and couldn’t get away from the demons they accidentally summon from an ancient book. In his feature debut, Uruguay director Fede Alvarez retains that setup, minus the vacation. In his vision, the young men […]
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Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio isn’t directed by Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, but it may as well be. His influence is draped lovingly all over the British film: • A projectionist seen only by his hands dons black gloves — the requisite accessory for many a murderer in the director’s giallo efforts. • The movie within […]
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The Way, Way Back
Fox Searchlight — the studio that brought us Garden State, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine — has a knack for these pleasure centers, and The Way, Way Back is the latest installment in this line of cutesy, sentimental films. It opens Friday. The story follows the 14-year-old Duncan (Liam James, TV’s The Killing), an awkward, […]