Category: Film Review

This latest effort to ignite a new generation of “Harry Potter” literary franchise hysteria for theaters has played its cards smartly by bringing in the actual director of the first two “Harry Potter” pictures. Chris Columbus returns to fantasy filmmaking after his disastrous flirtation with teen comedy in last summer’s “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” but a little rust still remains on his filmmaking antennae. Boldly produced and vivid throughout, “Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief” is a clunky kid-sized epic, able to conjure colossal acts of Greek myth wonderment, but never brave enough to shut its pie hole and let the audience process the screen magic.

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Valentine’s Day is a time of romance, endearment, and devotion. “Valentine’s Day” is a Garry Marshall film that’s unpleasant, occasionally mean-spirited, and ripples with Marshall’s prehistoric sense of humor. One’s a dubious holiday intended to boost the power of passion (along with card and candy sales), while the other is an insufferable feature film that’s miraculously saved by a few charming co-stars. I’m sure Marshall is a sweet fellow, but his movies have become clueless, klutzy abominations, with “Valentine’s Day” an affront to the art of love, somehow roping in an all-star cast to help sell the pure ick.

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“Hachi: A Dog’s Tale” is a poignant story of animal attachment, glazed with a sporadically viscous coating of sentimentality. Based on a true story, which was made into a blockbuster Japanese motion picture in 1987, “Hachi” has been Americanized, taking an account of lifelong affection to an attractive Northeastern playground, not to mention hauling Richard Gere in for some required star power. A circular routine of smiles and tears, “Hachi” is delightfully gentle and engaging, refusing to bloat the material past an elementary message of canine loyalty.

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“House of the Devil” is a throwback horror film that actually makes an effort to look and sound like a bygone era. Granted, 1980’s genre nostalgia is nothing cinematically revolutionary, perhaps even tiresome cliché at this point, but writer/director Ti West keeps to the task at hand. Forgoing irony or vile retro winks, “Devil” plays it straight. While that doesn’t generate the most riveting suspense piece of the year, it does deliver a hugely satisfying chiller that’s effectively minimal and marvelously made.

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There’s a power of mimicry and lavish flight photography that keeps the bio-pic “Amelia” in the air. This is not a strong motion picture, nor a particularly informative one. Instead, it’s a finely polished soap opera from a wonderful director starring fantastic actors, and nobody can quite connect the ambition of the piece with the execution. Moments of midair ecstasy hold it together and without those peaceful pauses of expression, “Amelia” is simply mawkish entertainment, stable and worthwhile for the uncommitted moviewatcher, but it never finds a comfortable altitude.

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I’ll give director Drew Barrymore this: she made Ellen Page appealing. “Whip It” takes the tart-tongued “Juno” star to the crashin’, smashin’ world of roller derby for a coming-of-age dramedy that bites off a little more than it can chew. Energetically woven by Barrymore, the film suffers from an acute case of the adaptation blues, trying to cram in as many plot points as possible to fill its belly with caloric melodrama. It’s a diluted journey of feminine self-realization, better with bruises and teamwork than it is with pliable matters of the heart.

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With “District B13” and last year’s runaway train of parental purpose, “Taken,” Pierre Morel positioned himself as a superior action director, and one of the few film minds able to process producer Luc Besson’s harebrained story ideas and cockamamie characterizations. “From Paris with Love” is their latest collaboration, but the timing is off, the script’s stupidity is more grating than endearing, and Morel is forced to contend with a giant slab of Hormel’s finest (assuming the shape of John Travolta) for this action-comedy. These are simple ingredients, but Morel and Besson appear distracted for this round of Euro smash-em-up, making the film disappointingly clumsy and strangely unadventurous.

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As strikingly animated and superlatively textured a motion picture as “The Secret of Kells” is, it can be a little aloof. A blend of history and mythology, the feature is a distinctive enterprise that aims to challenge family audiences and animation purists with a tenaciously 2-D snapshot of the world. It’s a passionate, dreamlike offering of filmmaking that requires the viewer to surrender to its often challenging storytelling, yet the time invested with this fringe player in the animation marketplace clash of the titans is rewarded with a resourceful, exquisite tale of tradition and education.

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With “Dear John,” Channing Tatum imparts a performance of startling vulnerability. It’s an emotion previously unseen from the actor, who mostly gravitates to roles that require intense amounts of pouting, Gap-ad posing, and B-boy grunts. It’s Channing’s newfound sense of soulful release that helps the sudser “Dear John” locate a special footing to work with, heading into the manipulative universe of author Nicholas Sparks armed with a somewhat settled, organic mood of emotional response to best repel the onion-peeling shamelessness of the whole endeavor.

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The first installment in a trilogy of British television crime dramas, “Red Riding: 1974” sets quite a bleak tone of criminal assault from the very start. A haunting, ornately designed odyssey of journalism, corruption, and viciousness, “1974” is an evocative motion picture that soars above its modest television origins. It’s a flawed picture, but in terms of sheer nightmarish scope and top-tier acting, it’s more assuredly constructed and bravely dire than anything Hollywood’s had to offer the genre in quite some time.

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The bodies of the West Yorkshire innocent are beginning to pile up in “Red Riding: 1980,” the increasingly literal-minded second chapter of the British television crime trilogy. More directly communicated than the previous installment, “1980” benefits from calmer direction and a better class of actors, while gradually drawing out an additional serial killer tale that goes beyond journalistic investigation to pry open the black heart of the local law.

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The profound burden of guilt steps out from the shadows in “Red Riding: 1983,” along with an overwhelming amount of exposition in this, the final act of the British television crime trilogy. It’s the wrap-up segment, in charge of taking the combined mystery of two films and paying it off in a tidy fashion, lest the audience feel they had given over five hours of their life to this endeavor and were left in an inexcusable dramatic void. “1983” is executed rather messily and demands a very concentrated viewer, but the rhythms of violation and corruption remain intact, supplying a fulfilling closer to this ambitious project.

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Mel Gibson has returned to acting after a seven year leave of absence, for better or worse, depending on your perspective. “Edge of Darkness” is the material that hooked Gibson out of his semi-retirement, a remake of a momentous BBC miniseries from 1985, directed once again by Martin Campbell (“Casino Royale”). Originally a six-hour engine of suspense and political intrigue, “Edge of Darkness” has been shaved down to a mere two hours of entertainment. It’s an uneasy translation, and while there’s an undeniably perverse pleasure in watching Gibson mow down baddies once again, the film as a whole doesn’t form a narrative convincing enough to support such action cinema luxuries.

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The comic relief is provided by Dax Shepard, Jon Heder, and Will Arnett; there’s a punchline where a needle is literally scratched off a record; a character exclaims “My bad!” after a piece of destructive slapstick; the screenplay makes absolutely no sense; and Danny DeVito plays a horny sausage salesman. See, this is what happens when Hollywood gives a romantic comedy to the director of “Daredevil,” “Ghost Rider,” and “Simon Birch.”

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Nick Nolte the actor is a celebrated professional with an eccentric, semi-enviable list of credits to his name, revealing a passion for the art form and willingness to surprise. Nick Nolte the man is a walking contradiction; he’s a soul on a life’s quest to find emotional truth in his profession, yet buries his feeling under layers of chemical excess and a pathological need to lie to the press. There’s no one better to tell the story of Nick Nolte than the actor himself, who takes center stage in this undeniably hypnotic but eventually aimless documentary.

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Paintball is a fascinating game, permitting average domesticated folk an opportunity to immerse themselves in a world of heated combat and precise military strategy, with the only possible downside being a few welts and stained clothing. “Paintball” is a low-budget thriller that twists purist enthusiasm for the sport in a rather macabre way, attaching life or death stakes to a pastime often associated with genial weekend warrior escapism.

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1978’s “Ice Castles” was a minor hit, but it struck a particular chord with teenage audiences, who ate up the treacly figure skating melodrama. The picture is a distant memory now, which leaves a sizable opportunity for a remake; something soft and sentimental to appeal to a whole new generation of young romantics. Stripped of its apple-cheeked Midwestern identity, grainy cinematography, and amusing histrionics, “Ice Castles” doesn’t make much of an impression the second time around. Forgoing nostalgia to play shamelessly to the Radio Disney generation, the upgrade is a gawky misfire, criminally monotonous from start to finish.

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“The Boys Are Back” had every possible invitation to fully submerge itself in the comforting folds of teeth-grinding melodrama. A story of parental misconduct, the picture is swarming with opportunities for grandstanding performances, domestic tragedy, and teary acts of forgiveness. Thank heavens for writer Allan Cubitt and director Scott Hicks, for they attack the material with an aim toward emotional realism, for better and for worse. A convincing drama helped along by a refreshingly vulnerable turn from star Clive Owen, “The Boys Are Back” shows unexpected resolve to approach the central conflict with sincerity, and that small effort takes something with the potential for dispiriting routine and makes it a truly responsive motion picture.

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Director Jonathan Mostow has never offended me as a filmgoer. His pictures have been routinely well-constructed and visually interesting (“Terminator 3,” “U-571,” “Breakdown”), even in the face of underwhelming plots and misguided performances. “Surrogates” is undoubtedly a misfire for the filmmaker, but it’s an interesting failure, peppered with a few memorable sequences and an appropriate, timely message highlighting the acceleration of social disconnect. While ambitious, the rhythm is off on this limping picture, with hints of severe studio interference derailing the movie from the moment it starts.

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Coming just a week after the holy roll of “The Book of Eli” is “Legion,” a film decidedly more literal about its heavenly intentions, pitting angels versus humans in a war for the future of civilization. Sounds pretty cool, right? Well, “Legion” is quite the opposite; it’s a labored, darkly photographed, cringingly acted hodgepodge of fanciful geek-bait genre ideas and hideous connect-the-dots scripting. Who knew the end of the world could be such a screaming bore.

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