Screen
Not genius, but still good
The most startling shot in Paranormal Activity 3 is something even the film’s determined unbelievers would concede to be damnably effective...
Mental illness explored
Something really bad is coming, an impending apocalypse, and only Curtis (Michael Shannon) can see it. His mom was institutionalized with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 10, however, so are his dreams prophetic or is he starting to lose it? This is the plot of ...
reel to reel | Week of Oct. 27, 2011
50/50 Though it’s a cancer film, the tender and funny 50/50 addresses its subject with a refreshing lack of melodrama. Based on the true story of Will Reiser, a comedy writer, the movie follows Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who gets diagnosed with the C-word. ...
Dancing without chemistry
The country-twang remake of Footloose strives to give us a more down-home experience than the original film...
A more engaging Thing
The slippery, effective new version of The Thing serves as a prequel to the 1982 John Carpenter film, explaining what went down, down in Antarctica, after the intergalactic thing thawed and began eviscerating humans and a husky or two...
Listen to your soothsayer
Bad things happened to Julius Caesar on March 15, proof that you should always listen to your soothsayer...
Bizarre tale from the future
Real Steel, a tale of a boy and his metallic 8-foot man-pet, may well drill past its own tin-plated inanities and strike gold, or oil, or something. My kid wants to see it; therefore I think it’ll be a hit...
The dreaded ’20’
It´s a close call, given the lousiness and the scolding tone of much of her material, but Anna Faris survives What’s Your Number? with eccentric comic charm intact. Dumb film; smart comedienne...
Serious as cancer
It´s a cancer film; no getting around it. But the tender and funny 50/50 addresses its protagonist’s health crisis and chances for survival directly, with a refreshing lack of narrative hemming, hawing or embroidery, so that it becomes something more: a picture with ...
