(2013) Strange as it sounds, come March 2, one of the films that stands a good chance of walking home with an Academy Award is Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa. It’s one of three nominees in the category of makeup, but still, the recognition marks real progress for films that open with a senior citizen getting […]
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The To Do List
Among her high school’s class of 1993, Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza, Safety Not Guaranteed) has less merit as valedictorian and more notoriety as the uptight virgin. Everyone knows, and no one lets her forget. Brandy seems to have accomplished everything, from her full-ride scholarship to Georgetown University to her self-published feminist magazine. Despite her penchant […]
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Kiss of the Damned
Ushered into that world is Paolo (Milo Ventimiglia, That’s My Boy), a screenwriter who meets the mysterious, gorgeous Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume, Johnny English Reborn). Because of her “skin condition,” she’s a night owl who spends much of her time holed up in an isolated mansion watching old movies by Buñuel and Di Sica. […]
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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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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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Femme Fatales: The Complete Second Season
This second batch of episodes, 12 in all on two DVDs, seems more confident than Femme‘s freshman outing, even if story quality remains wildly varied. Tanit Phoenix (Safe House) hosts the proceedings, with scenarios that include: • a comic-book heroine, • time-traveling clones, • noir-drenched detectives • and so much moaning. For every leaden dud […]
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Bullet to the Head
Based on a French graphic novel, Bullet shoots in the so-tired setting of New Orleans, where Sly’s Bonomo plies his trade as a hit man. Following his assassination of a former D.C. police officer, Bonomo finds his own partner killed by a hulking minion (Jason Momoa, Conan the Barbarian) taking orders from corrupt businessman Baptiste […]
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The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
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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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 […]