No sooner as the movie opened than a nuclear bomb has dropped. The precious few apartment building residents with the most recognizable, screen-friendly faces are those who conveniently find shelter in the basement, barricaded by a huge steel door that the supe, Mickey (Michael Biehn, Take Me Home Tonight), seals to keep out any radiation. […]
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The Case of the Black Parrot
Aboard an ocean liner depicted by really rough stock footage, intrepid journalist Jim Moore (William Lundigan, The Sea Hawk) and his ukulele-strumming cameraman/war buddy, Tripod (Eddie Foy Jr., The Pajama Game), are on a doozy of an assignment when they’re told about an impending strike of The Black Parrot, Europe’s master criminal. Explains old rich […]
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The Wicker Tree
The new film is based upon Hardy’s own 2006 novel, Cowboys for Christ, but here’s the deal: If you’ve seen the original Wicker, you know exactly where this new one leads, and without the benefit of having Edward Woodward as your guide. In The Wicker Tree, it’s young Christian country starlet Beth Boothby (newcomer Brittania […]
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Miss Bala
Maria was also full of praise, earning an Academy Award nomination; Miss Bala was Mexico’s official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Oscars, but failed to make the cut. It feels like an inferior duplicate — not vastly inferior, but noticeably, thanks to a running time that grows as repetitive as those […]
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The Darkest Hour
Amid a citywide power outage, aliens fall from the sky in the form of orange fireballs that then turn more or less invisible, but immediately incinerate all humans they can get their “hands” on. As luck would have it, our heroes manage to survive by holing up, along with the aforementioned babes (Transformers‘ Rachael Taylor […]
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Crime time
The gun was on the couch, smoke still wafting from its muzzle. Stretched out on the marble floor: a poor sap, now just fodder for the city morgue. The woman stood beside him, her face as cold and impenetrable as a cheap waxwork. “It wasn’t me,” she purred. “I swear.” I lit a cigarette, took […]
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Grand Central Murder
She receives just such a threatening call from an ex (“Death and me are just around the corner,” he warns, “don’t keep us waiting”), so she locks herself in a private train car at Grand Central Station, saying, “He’ll never find me there.” Famous last words. And among the first uttered in Grand Central Murder, […]
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We Bought a Zoo
Based on a true story, the movie stars Matt Damon (Contagion) as Benjamin Mee, a widower of six months and father of two who, sick of pity, unreasonably quits his newspaper reporter job on the spur of the moment, only to more unreasonably purchase a home in the country with a built-in, rundown zoo — […]
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Sleeping Beauty
Here, it’s Lucy (Emily Browning, Sucker Punch), a college student so strapped for cash that she holds four jobs: working at a café, doing Xerox duties in an office, participating in a medical study that requires a balloon and tube to be fed down her throat, and blowing guys at a bar. A fifth gig […]
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The Hidden Face
Drowning his sorrows in drink soon leads Adrián into the warm embrace of a button-cute waitress, Fabiana (Martina García), and they fall in love. All’s well again, but the police suspect something is up with Belen’s inexplicable vanishing act. Something is up in The Hidden Face, a thriller from Spain new to DVD on the […]