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 […]
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Django Unchained
The result is a brutal, bloody epic that hits theaters on Christmas Day. Happy birthday, Jesus! Paying homage to the Italian Django franchise birthed in 1966, Tarantino delivers what could serve as the origin story of the bounty hunter, if not for his Civil War-era setting and race-reversal casting. Jamie Foxx (Horrible Bosses) is enormously […]
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Big Boi — Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors
Perhaps the best part about this blend is that it never seems forced. Big Boi is able to show his versatility throughout, and he never seems uncomfortable, regardless of the song’s vibe. Big Boi did an excellent job of selecting features for this project. He welcomes rappers like T.I., Ludacris, Killer Mike, Kid Cudi, and […]
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The Frozen
Mike knows Emma isn’t thrilled about the trip. What he doesn’t know is that she’s just found out she’s pregnant. That’s an issue they can deal with later, however; more pressing is that their snowmobile crashes, leaving them injured and no cell signal to call for help. Plus, it appears they are being followed. It’s […]
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Lawless
Reteaming with his unlikely Proposition screenwriter, Bad Seeds rocker Nick Cave, Hillcoat again delivers a quasi-Western with this true tale of the Prohibition-era’s bootlegging Bondurant brothers in Virginia, played by Tom Hardy (The Dark Knight Rises), Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) and Shia LaBeouf (the Transformers trilogy). When Lawless begins, the Bondurant boys rule Franklin […]
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Deathtrap
Here, Caine stars as Sidney Bruhl, a playwright who has just suffered his fourth straight Broadway flop. Much to the dismay of his wife, Myra (Dyan Cannon, who appeared in an equally keep-’em-guessing film in 1973’s The Last of Sheila), his solution is to kill Clifford Anderson (Christopher Reeve), the former seminar student who has […]
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Still swinging, swinging
Tyson Ritter Ten years ago, The All-American Rejects were wide-eyed kids fresh out of Stillwater, just inking a deal to rerelease their self-titled debut album with DreamWorks Records after a limited release through an indie label. The humble pop-rock act had a standout single in “Swing, Swing” on its hands, and the rest is history. […]
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Hitchcock
Hitchcock, which opens Friday, isn’t a bad movie; it’s just a baffling one. Purportedly about the making of 1960’s Psycho, it winds up a hodgepodge of old-fashioned biopic, bogus psychological thriller and simplistic domestic melodrama. The film, however, is hardly the work of incompetents. Director Sacha Gervasi has an absorbing rockumentary (Anvil: The Story of […]
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Various artists — A Blackwatch Christmas Vol. II
A Blackwatch Christmas Vol. II sports some of the biggest local artists yet, with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, Graham Colton and more onboard. The former’s “Santa’s Magic Beard” is gentler than you might expect; well-crafted and tightly arranged, it has all the makings of a holiday classic. Colton’s “Holiday Season” is also a bit of […]
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The Ice House
The corpse is located in the titular locale on the grounds of an opulent estate occupied by three women whom the townspeople refer to as “the butch beauties of Streech Grange.” The home is owned by Phoebe Maybury (Penny Downie, Invictus), whose husband disappeared a decade earlier — a case that remains unsolved. She lives […]