In a time when some politicians now kick off their campaigns in gun shops, armed yokels wave the Confederate flag outside the White House, a candidate in the South hosts target practice with President Obama’s face for a bull’s eye, a movie like “The Purge: Anarchy” must seem a gift from God to members of […]
Film review
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Film Review: “Lucy”
Despite its persistence, the theory that human beings use only 10 percent of their brain’s capacity has long since been proven false — the scientific community’s equivalent of an urban legend — but that hasn’t stopped storytellers from exploiting the way the myth has seeped into the public consciousness. The widespread fallacy is an easy […]
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Film Review: “A Most Wanted Man”
When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the specter of international communism ceased its decades of haunting the frightened souls of the West, many commentators wondered if the espionage novelist John le Carré would suddenly run out of subjects. But the author, one of the best contemporary English novelists, simply applied […]
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Film Review: “Sex Tape”
In the high-concept farce, “Sex Tape,” Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel star as a long-married couple who, in an attempt to reignite the marital fires, record an epic, marathon-length session of lovemaking, only to find out the next morning that their amorous adventures have been accidentally uploaded to “the cloud” and synced to several iPads […]
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Film Review: “Venus in Fur”
Arriving late for an open-call audition, an actress, Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), tries to convince a first-time director and playwright, Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), that she’s perfect for the lead role in his production, a staged version of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s 1870 novel, “Venus in Furs” (the author’s name is where the term “masochism” originates, so that […]
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Film Review: “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes”
The latest chapter in the long “Planet of the Apes” saga takes up the action just a few years into the future promised in the ending of the previous film, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.” Some news reports bring the situation up to date, describing the rapid spread of the “simian virus,” actually […]
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Film Review: “Fed Up”
Our nation’s deadly epidemic of obesity is the focus of “Fed Up,” an effective new activist documentary from director Stephanie Soechtig (“Tapped”) and executive producer Katie Couric (also narrating the film). Sharing a producer (Laurie Lennard) with the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth,” the doc clearly hopes to do for this health crisis what that film […]
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Film Review: “Third Person”
Paul Haggis, the Academy Award-winning writer-director of “Crash,” is back in similar territory with “Third Person,” another multi-narrative, everyone-is-connected melodrama which unfortunately shares many of the same problems that plagued his ponderously didactic Best Picture winner. His new film weaves together three separate storylines taking place in three different countries. In the first, an award-winning […]
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Film Review: “Snowpiercer”
The concept of the apocalypse and especially its aftermath never ceases to fascinate science fiction writers and filmmakers. Whether it comes with a bang or a whimper, the end of the world makes for exciting cinema, but the day after doomsday provides the most promising subject for literature and film. Writers and directors employ a […]
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“Transformers: Age of Extinction”
If nothing else, the latest addition to one of the most successful contemporary franchises demonstrates once again that Hollywood can build a movie, whatever its quality, on the most unlikely foundation. Novels, short stories, plays, comic books, songs, even most recently a painting (“Belle”) provide the sources for hundreds of films, but the “Transformer” series […]
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“They Came Together”
Thus far, it’s been an exceptional summer at the movies. We’ve been lucky enough to have week after week of crowd-pleasing, smart blockbusters of every variety, from family films (“How to Train Your Dragon 2”) to sci-fi (“Edge of Tomorrow”) to superhero (“X-Men: Days of Future Past”) and comedy (“22 Jump Street”), but that non-stop […]
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“We Are the Best!”
There’s an exclamation point added to the title of Swedish auteur Lukas Moodysson’s exuberant coming-of-age comedy, “We Are the Best!” — about three adolescent girls who decide to start a punk rock band — and the signifier couldn’t be more deserved. Set in Stockholm in the early 80’s, the film follows best friends Bobo (Mira […]
