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Film Review

Il Doofy

by John Rodat May 24, 2012

I found the latest Sacha Baron Cohen comedy, The Dictator, tedious and predictable; though I’m not really a fan of Cohen’s work, I am surprised to have to use those adjectives. Cohen’s appeal is largely ...

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Passages To India

by Ann Morrow May 24, 2012

Most movies start with a concept, but rarely from a concept that could be found in real life. Yet The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is such a movie: Adapted from These Foolish Things, a novel ...

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Gentle Enough for Baby

by Laura Leon May 24, 2012

The enormous success of What to Expect When You’re Expecting and its, er, literary offspring was in large part due to the timing of its debut, which paralleled the beginning of mommy-baby chic. Not only ...

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Long In the Fangs

by Ann Morrow May 16, 2012

Long before there was True Blood, or Twilight, or even The Vampire Lestat, there was Barnabas Collins—the first of the sympathetic mainstream vampires, a bloodsucker with a flair for human-style melodrama and a devotion to ...

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The Gang’s All Here

by Shawn Stone May 10, 2012

This flick is pretty darn good. Millions have seen it. If you’re going to the movies this weekend, it’s statistically likely you’ll buy a ticket for The Avengers. Why not let’s give it three and ...

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Twits

by Laura Leon May 10, 2012

Judging from the popularity of Michelle Obama’s J Crew cardigans, ballet shoes and dirndl skirts, “prep,” as style and visual conceit, might have made a minor comeback in the last few years. But it’s a ...

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Punchy

by Shawn Stone May 2, 2012

When is the fighting going to start? That’s the question that pops into one’s head when settling in to watch a Jason Statham movie. Statham is the preeminent action star of our day, with a cinematic ...

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Dumb Love

by Laura Leon May 2, 2012

The Five Year Engagement starts out cute—in fact, really cute, although not in a way that makes you cringe (that comes later). Tom (Jason Segal) proposes to Violet (Emily Blunt) on a romantic San Fran ...

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Hack Work

by Ann Morrow May 2, 2012

A tale more grotesque than arabesque, The Raven replaces Edgar Allan Poe’s “opulent imagination” with a standard-issue horror story. Though it stars Poe himself (John Cusack), the plot is merely an excuse to fill in ...

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Real People

by Shawn Stone April 26, 2012

If action is character, then young Cyril (Thomas Doret) can’t run away from himself fast enough. The titular “kid with a bike” in the Dardenne brothers’ latest chamber drama is angry and hurt for good ...

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Game Changer

by Laura Leon April 26, 2012

A few years ago, comedian Steve Harvey came out with a book called Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man, which outlined a new—or rather, an old—playbook for women to follow if they wanted ...

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Out of the Ruins

by Shawn Stone April 18, 2012

The title of Terence Davies’ soulful film based on Terence Rattigan’s play has nothing to do with the ocean. It refers to the idiom (and Tin Pan Alley standard) in which someone laments being caught ...

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A Kick in the Head

by Laura Leon April 18, 2012

When I was a little girl, watching the Three Stooges, like The Andy Griffith Show, seemed completely a guy thing. Truly, other than my mother, I didn’t know any females who regularly watched, or enjoyed, ...

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The Human Dimension

by Laura Leon April 11, 2012

The transformation of the 1997 sensation, Titanic, into 3D may seem like a mere gimmick, designed to propel millions of kids who never saw the original back to the multiplex for a first gander. OK, ...

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A Royal Pain

by Ann Morrow April 11, 2012

The Material Girl directs a movie about material culture in W.E., Madonna’s utterly meaningless biopic about “the romance of the century” between Wallis Simpson, an American social climber, and Edward, Prince of Wales, who abdicated ...

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Wish Fulfillment

by Laura Leon April 4, 2012

Fairy tales are everywhere these days, and I couldn’t be happier ever after. The tremendous TV shows Once Upon a Time and Grimm, and the debut of Tarsem Singh’s take on Snow White, Mirror Mirror, ...

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Mythmash

by Ann Morrow April 4, 2012

The gods of Olympus are a bunch of Tinkerbells. Or so it seems in Wrath of the Titans, a frenetic, imbecilic action movie that just happens to involve Zeus and his extended family of deities. ...

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Grim Humanity

by Shawn Stone March 29, 2012

Another Holocaust movie? Yes, another Holocaust movie—and a good one, this time. And by “good,” I mean a drama without easy answers and only tarnished heroes. The Oscar-nominated In Darkness tells the harrowing story of a ...

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Teenage Drivel

by Shawn Stone March 29, 2012

Filmmakers have become adept at bringing us the end of the world: zombies, plagues, natural disasters, Biblical wrath, comic-book doom and other such grim whatnot. The Hunger Games brings something new to the “post-apocalyptic dystopia” ...

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Pecking Order

by Ann Morrow March 22, 2012

Is it too early for 2005 nostalgia? You know, those mid-years before the super-sensitizing of alternate sexuality, green economy, and inclusiveness over exclusiveness? Apparently not, because 21 Jump Street, a spoof on the late-’80s Fox ...

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Say What?

by Laura Leon March 22, 2012

Casa De Mi Padre is a weird little film—little not just in terms of its short running time (84 minutes), but also its ambition. Director Matt Piedmont, writer Andrew Steele and star Will Ferrell set ...

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A Separation

by The Staff March 15, 2012

A Separation, the Iranian movie that just won the Best Foreign Film Oscar, demands your attention from its first seconds. Married couple Simin (Leila Hatami) and Nader (Peyman Moadi) sit before a judge who will ...

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John Carter

by Ann Morrow March 15, 2012

The works of Edgar Rice Burroughs are so influential in terms of modern blockbusters that it’s almost impossible to adapt them for the screen nowadays without recalling the movies that Burroughs inspired: Stars Wars, for ...

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Get Lost

by Laura Leon March 1, 2012

Jill, a waitress troubled with fractured memories of having a year earlier been kidnapped and left in a hole in the woods, comes home from her late shift to discover her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) ...

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Three Stooges

by The Staff February 23, 2012

This Means War is a romantic comedy structured around a love triangle, and is more than faintly reminiscent of a another movie, Design for Living, that just came out on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. ...

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