Just as did director Guillermo del Toro in Pan’s Labyrinth, first-time feature director Benh Zeitlin requires a suspension of disbelief to become part of a world seen and understood through a young girl’s eyes. Just as the creative force of Ofelia’s imagination in that 2006 film fought back against Franco’s fascism, this one, embodied in […]
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Steve Niles’ Remains
Making Reno, Nev., look like a miserable stinkhole of a city — and that’s even before any undead show up — Remains focuses on the dozens of denizens who play and work in the Silver Star Hotel and Casino. When a government test of a new “nuke oven” goes awry, everyone who’s not, say, having […]
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Casting the Runes
Those working on a TV special on the history of witchcraft have peculiar run-ins with a mysterious, reclusive alchemist known as Karswell (Iain Cuthbertson, Gorillas in the Mist), a man who openly espouses lust, deviance and all-around evil. When one character recalls a co-worker’s fatal brush with Karswell (depicted in the prologue) and says that […]
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Casa de Mi Padre
Shot in “Mexicoscope” by director Matt Piedmont (TV’s Funny or Die Presents …), the movie casts Ferrell as dumpy ranch hand Armando Alvarez who inadvertently gets mixed up in the drug war between his favored brother, Raul (Diego Luna, Contraband), and Raul’s nemesis (Gael García Bernal, Babel). To further complicate matters, he falls for his […]
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Lockout
I know exactly what a Besson production will mean: high-concept action rendered as a high-octane cartoon in live-action, with a severe chance for martial arts. The French filmmaker’s name equals a style equals a brand. His aesthetic appears even when he doesn’t direct. His creative stamp supersedes all. And so it is again with Lockout, […]
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Some Guy Who Kills People
Corrigan often plays losers and underdogs, but rarely as the lead. Here, he’s ice cream parlor worker Kenny Boyd, sometimes further humiliated by having to don a costume as a mint chocolate chip cone at kids’ birthday parties. But, hey, it beats the loony bin, from which he’s newly sprung. Bullied and tormented since his […]
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I Wish
In the Japanese-language film I Wish, two brothers are coping as best they can with their parents’ separation and impending divorce. Twelve-year-old Koichi (Koki Maeda) is pensive and anxious, not cripplingly so, but enough for him to worry — not without some justification — why no one in his town seems alarmed about living in […]
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Endeavour
Set in 1965, the Masterpiece Mystery telefilm finds young Detective Constable Endeavour Morse (Shaun Evans, Being Julia) at a career crossroads, thinking of quitting the force when a big case diverts his attention: the disappearance — and subsequent murder — of a poetry-loving student. Needless to say, it’s not the only corpse that will show […]
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Cherry Bomb
The title refers to a stripper (Julin Jean, The Final) who is raped on the job by five guys in the “champagne room” at 3 a.m. Because one of them is a big construction honcho in the community and properly lawyered up, the cops do nothing. In revenge, her estranged brother (John Rodriguez) accidentally kills […]
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Of Dolls & Murder
What are nutshell studies? CSI viewers might recall season seven’s year-long arc of dollhouse miniatures of the crime scene left at each crime scene (“I think Malibu Barbie did it”). Those were based on the real-life models ranging from 1-inch- to 1-foot-scale, made with an über-meticulous attention to detail in the 1930s by the unheralded […]