Screen

Black humorless

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Low-brow. Just expect it from Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver ( Jack Black) first arrives at the kingdom of Lilliput and puts out a raging fire by dropping his shorts and urinating, I was astonished by the audience laughter. This is a film unabashedly aimed at teen...

‘How it feels to be black’

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Rediscovering Gordon Parks with Criterion’s release of ‘The Learning Tree’

All is grace

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General Lorens Löwenhielm (Jarl Kulle), a middle-aged man with a lifetime of missed opportunities behind him, has come to dinner. Seated next to his...

Mechanical failure

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The Mechanic is Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham), a crack assassin who can kill his targets without leaving a trace, and even — as we learn later — implicate third parties in the crime. Impressive. Except as we watch Bishop blunder his way through target after target, ...

reel to reel | Week of Sept. 22, 2011

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Abduction...

film

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BEING GINGER...

Life before test screenings

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"And then the big Native American smothers him to death with a pillow after he sees that he’s been lobotomized! Wait, Mr. Producer! Where are you going...

Missed payoff

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Maybe in a few years, the high-flying machinations of notorious Washington puppet-master Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, his partner in crime, will be funny. But even with Kevin Spacey trying his carnival barker hardest in Casino Jack, it still feels too painfully...

Serious as cancer

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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 ...

Arrested development

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It´s not easy being mean, as Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s latest project, Young Adult — directed by her Juno collaborator, Jason Reitman — goes about illustrating with an intriguing, unsettled blend of pity and pitilessness...

A magical tale through film history

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Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a scruffy orphan who lives in forgotten spaces hidden in the walls of Gare Montparnasse, a bustling train station located in the center of Paris. It’s 1931 and memories of The Great War are fresh, even as everyone tries to resume their ...

Reel to reel | Week of September 20, 2012

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2 DAYS IN NEW YORK...