Category: Film Review

There’s cheeky homage, and then there’s “Detention of the Dead.” Adapted
from a play by Rob Rinow, the feature aims to induce nostalgia, chills,
laughs, and tears by mixing the sensitive juvenile delinquent antics of
the “The Breakfast Club” with the zombie stomp of George Romero’s “Dawn
of the Dead,” trusting knowing audiences will receive a charge out of
the numerous references that litter the film. Unfortunately, the
opposing tones rarely complement each other, rendering “Detention of the
Dead” a misfire in terms of intended buoyancy. While it features some
pleasing tech credits and an engaged cast, the effort swings too wildly
from sensitivity to slapstick, resulting in a disagreeably disorienting
viewing experience.
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It opens with a quote from an 18th century poem and ends with a display
of stupidity right out of 2013. It’s difficult to make heads or tails
out of the mystery “Rushlights,” and the filmmaking certainly doesn’t
reward the patience required to remain on top of the screenplay’s
network of twists and turns. Overstuffed with motivations in an attempt
to keep viewers guessing until the insipid conclusion, “Rushlights”
mangles its noir intentions by trying way too hard to inflate itself
into something significant. It’s clear from the opening act that
co-writer/director Antoni Stutz should play this material with more
venom and less bluster, but there’s no stopping the effort when it slips
into runaway boulder mode, squashing any chance for a sleek, effective
puzzler.
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“Dirty Wars” is journalism, but it’s the type of journalism typically
found on news magazine programs and cable networks. In his attempt to
reach out and reveal the U.S. Government’s secret war on the rest of the
world, reporter Jeremy Scahill welcomes the birth of his own myth,
turning “Dirty Wars” into a love letter to his own research methods and
capacity for understanding. There’s an abundance of searing,
illuminating information contained within director Richard Rowley’s
documentary about untoward military activity, but there are even more
glory shots of Scahill in motion, recreating critical moments of his
investigation while he blasts the camera with blue steel.
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For some reason, the “Hatchet” series continues on. Unleashed in 2007,
the horror-comedy “Hatchet” failed to attract much attention during its
theatrical run, building its cult appeal on home video. 2010’s “Hatchet
II” trumpeted its unrated release in theaters, only to welcome few
takers, once again taking to the comfort of rentals to sate its modest
fanbase. And now “Hatchet III” is here, wisely electing to share its
bruised funny bone on the VOD market, bringing the pain directly to the
people. It’s admirable to see franchise mastermind Adam Green continue
to make these gruesome features despite limited outside interest, but
it’s become increasingly difficult to distinguish one installment from
the other, separated only by a few changes in casting and the shifting
face of evil himself, Victor Crowley.
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“Berberian Sound Studio” is a challenging picture that will be absolute
catnip to film fans, especially those with a fondness for the Italian
movie industry of the 1970s. Bizarre and tastefully incomprehensible,
the effort is reserved for those who enjoy the process of interpretation
without much in the way of clues. However impenetrable the work
becomes, “Berberian Sound Studio” is a lush, disturbing voyage into a
gradual mental breakdown, artfully crafted by director Peter Strickland,
who provides magnificent attention to detail and a fixation on an
unsettling sense of decay, enhancing the reptilian skin of this
enticingly weird feature. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Superheroes do not get much more sincere than Superman. He’s a symbol of
hope, a fantasy of justice, and a slice of Americana down to his red
and blue outfit. So what happens when a lively character of pure bravery
is brought to the big screen in 2013, when sour introspection, graphic
violence, and doomsday action rakes in major box office bucks? The
result is “Man of Steel,” a concentrated effort to bend the Superman
mythos into the shape of the Bat-signal. While fresh narrative
directions and a radical redesign of known elements are welcome, it’s
odd to find the latest from Zack Snyder essentially reheating what’s
come before, straining to give the faithful what they love while
stripping away intrinsic emotional expanse and the joyful experience of
superpowers. Superman has been turned into a song by The Smiths. He was
much more interesting as a sweeping orchestral explosion.
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Fueled by an obsession with low-fi terror and how it could reinvigorate
the horror anthology subgenre, 2012’s “V/H/S” misfired more than it
maimed. Hobbled by artistic unevenness and a dim-witted wraparound
story, the jerky, exceedingly violent endeavor didn’t seem like a
natural fit for sequels. However, never underestimate the power of a
cult audience. Less than a year later, we’re faced with “V/H/S/2,” which
continues the saga of the haunted videotapes, only the quality of the
shorts presented here is miles ahead of what’s come before, with a
newfound dedication to turning these disparate visions of doom into
interesting little slices of POV misery, finding noticeable care poured
into the work to form a stronger, more cohesive sequel.
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I’ll give star Paul Walker this much credit: if it ain’t broke, don’t
fix it. After blistering the box office with the powerhouse sequel “Fast
& Furious 6,” Walker remains behind the wheel for “Vehicle 19,”
another picture that requires an intense range of grimaces in tight
close-up while a professional movie stunt team makes a mess of city
blocks and fellow automobiles. Low-tech and initially diverting, the
feature soon rides on dramatically bald tires with Walker in the lead
role, unable to squeeze out the necessary anguish to communicate the
wrong place, wrong time feel of the script, often caught slack-jawed and
staring when the moment demands raw emotion.
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Dating back nearly 50 years, documentaries concerning the sport of
surfing have become an intriguing subgenre. Detailing the passions and
pursuits of young men and their dreams of oceanic playtime, the
pictures, such as “The Endless Summer,” share a common quest to outdo
the competition, visiting exotic locales and taking on larger, meaner
waves to make the requisite impression on a most impressionable
audience. “Storm Surfers 3D” takes thrills and spills to the next level,
following champion surfers Ross Clarke-Jones and Tom Carroll as they
hunt for rare breaks and hidden locales using the gift of science. This
is no spiritual journey, it’s a meteorological one, out the capture
aquatic ferocity and personal victory using the latest in industry
trends.
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“This Is the End” is a rare picture that goes from being completely
indescribable to being somewhat conventional. It’s a cinematic house
party from star/co-writer/co-director Seth Rogen, who calls in a slew of
favors and gathers his tight-knit crew of funny folk to make a
scattergun comedy that touches on the apocalypse, exorcisms, estranged
friends, cannibalism, and the comfort of a Milky Way candy bar. It’s the
end of the world turned into screen insanity by actors playing
themselves, and the results are undeniably amusing, but hardly supply
the bellylaughs one would expect from such sleepover atmosphere of pals
making a hearty, weed-foggy doomsday commotion.
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The release of “Rapture-Palooza” displays some interesting timing,
quickly ushered into theaters within the same week Seth Rogen’s “This Is
the End,” another end-of-days comedy, makes its big debut. Making the
situation even more uncomfortable, the dueling doomsday movies share a
lead actor in Craig Robinson, who also takes an executive producer
credit on “Rapture-Palooza.” The competition is unfortunate, since one
film is authentically funny, features some sense of imagination when it
comes to the grim details of the apocalypse, and provides a
fantastically game all-star cast of funny folk, while the other effort
is “Rapture-Palooza.”
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It’s hard to believe that “Tiger Eyes” represents the first major motion
picture adaption of a Judy Blume novel. The celebrated author (“Are You
There God? It’s Me, Margaret”), once a mighty junior high library
beacon to adolescents everywhere, seems like a natural fit for teen
cinema tastes, with her frank discussions of growing pains and her
commitment to an honest assessment of emergent emotions. While Blume’s
world is long overdue for a big screen spin, it’s unfortunate that the
first effort out of the gate is “Tiger Eyes.” While the feature is rich
with malleable misery and juvenile disquiet, it makes for a leaden,
rushed movie, with Blume’s own son responsible for mucking with the
nuances of the source material, flattening promising conflicts and
painful introspection.
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Romantic comedies have it rough these days, but most invite misery
through absurdly pedestrian screenwriting and dismal, overly vanilla
casting. The British production “I Give It a Year” manages to indulge a
touch of warmth via carefully managed bitterness, dissecting the genre
to locate ideal notes of distress and embarrassment to play. In danger
of becoming yet another relationship picture that misunderstands the
Richard Curtis formula, the movie instead acquires its own personality
of vulgar humor and matrimonial inspection, delivering on laughs and
knowing cohabitational nods as it makes an agreeable screen mess of
emotions and impulses, carried largely by an ensemble clearly enjoying
the opportunity to send up the foibles of coupledom.
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In 2005, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson co-starred in “Wedding Crashers,” a
vulgar R-rated comedy that ended up becoming one of the biggest
pictures of the year. Bizarrely, a sequel was never attempted. Instead
of an official follow-up, there’s “The Internship,” which takes the
opposite tonal route of “Wedding Crashers,” containing its
outrageousness to a PG-13 uproar, while amplifying its feel-good
intentions to win over the big summer crowds. The film feels weirdly
gutless, especially from known rapscallions such as Wilson and Vaughn,
showing surprisingly little hunger to land monster laughs, instead
finding comfort in a tired underdog story gifted a tech-world spin.
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“The Purge” has a crackerjack premise it takes absolutely no interest
in. It’s a disappointing feature that contains a substantial amount of
stupidity, asking its audience to digest an entire buffet of illogic as
it discards any hope for a profoundly satiric or meditative approach to a
futureworld story of government-branded nationwide order via
unspeakable violence. “The Purge” is careless work, more interested in
summoning a haunted house atmosphere of cliched chills than exhaustively
working over the potential of the piece, bringing to the screen a dire
depiction of a world gone mad. Instead, the movie runs through the
motions, gradually lobotomizing itself over 85 wasteful minutes.
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Screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher won an Academy Award for his first
produced work, 2009’s “Precious,” and now graduates to the director’s
chair with “Violet & Daisy,” which is about as far removed from his
industry introduction as possible. Taking on the assassin genre with
initial hints toward the formation of a jailbait-killer satire, Fletcher
soon loses the snap of his bubblegum, grinding the picture to a halt
with banal stretches of dialogue and location claustrophobia. Leads
Alexia Bledel and Saoirse Ronan show spark and interest to lean into the
shaming Fletcher initially appears to value, but their efforts are
gradually flooded by a helmer who doesn’t quite know what type of movie
he wants to make.
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“Before Midnight” represents the next stage of development for the
Richard Linklater-directed series, which wasn’t truly intended to be a
string of movies in the first place. With 1995’s “Before Sunrise” and
2004’s “Before Sunset,” Linklater, along with star Ethan Hawke and Julie
Delpy, crafted loquacious inspections of the human heart, studying the
development of a tentative relationship as it grew from flirtation to
promises, from loss to love. Now the topic is marriage and all its
pitfalls and challenges, returning to the once springy lovers nearly two
decades after they first met on a European train. True to form,
Linklater doesn’t rock the boat with this second sequel, embarking on a
familiar odyssey of conversation, personal inventory, and brutal
honesty.
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There’s an effective feeling of unease that hangs in the air of “Wish
You Were Here,” a mystery film of sorts that walks a rough path toward
tragedy. It’s a vacation-gone-wrong story, but one that’s not interested
in generating fear, just unbearable tension as a simple journey into a
foreign land proves disastrous, yet the participants refuse to divulge
the details of their unraveling. Tightly constructed and honest with
character relationships, “Wish You Were Here” is a riveting study of
guilt and moral corruption, wisely using disorientation to sustain
interest in the bleak proceedings.
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There are moments in “The Kings of Summer” that conjure a feeling of
pressurized adolescence, where innocence is depleting and parental
quarrels turn into all-out war. And there are sequences presented here
that resemble an audition tape for the Groundlings. It’s an unevenness
that holds the picture low to the ground, despite its effort to come off
as a document of juvenile concerns. Actually, there’s little about “The
Kings of Summer” that’s consistent, rendering the film irksome in its
randomness, finding a few profound windows to the soul before it lurches
back into shtick coma mode, trying to come across silly when a more
refined dramatic approach would support the intended emotional and
nostalgic response.
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“The History of Future Folk” is a perfectly pleasant picture. It’s not
remarkable work, but a surprisingly gentle entry into the comedic
musical duo sweepstakes once populated by the likes of Tenacious D and
Flight of the Conchords, though the paring of Nils d’Aulaire and Jay
Klaitz doesn’t aspire to any sort of comedic anarchy. Instead, directors
John Mitchell and Jeremy Kipp Walker play it comfortable with this
oddball sci-fi musical, trusting in their own scripted reality to a
degree that such passion rubs off on the audience, disarmed by the
feature’s generous spirit and set-list of toe-tapping tunes.
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