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Bad title, good movie
Forty-five minutes or so into Tower Heist, the question arises: Is this movie with the title of purest generica — was “Stealing Money” taken? — truly good, or simply less bad than most of what director Brett Ratner has done previously...
More free dumb!
The exhaustive brilliance of both Mad Max: Fury Road and Creed means you can’t dismiss a sequel outright just because of a decades-long gap...
Better than nothing
Set in Manhattan, The Switch is all over the place. But around the halfway point it starts getting interesting and the people who put it together are at least working in a realm of reasonable intelligence and wit and respect for the audience. I wish it were great, ...
Leave only memories; take only pictures
Images hold a very special place in the mind of the viewer. Simultaneously of one time and timeless, objective and subjective, images bring forth textures and dimensions often lost in memory that can reduce the complex into simplistic categories of black and white...
You got it, Bob
I started putting a bunch of dick jokes on Twitter the other day, and I just kept doing it because it was really annoying people,” says Bob Saget. “Well, I’m a 9-year-old boy. You tell me not to say something, and I’ll just say it...
The M stands for middling
For the first time in over a decade, director M. Night Shyamalan has made a film that won’t end up on many “worst of the year” lists come late-December… but will probably be forgotten by early next week. The Visit is a horror film presented in the cheap, “found ...
The bright side of Mexico
Talking on the phone with longtime record producer-turned-filmmaker Duncan Bridgeman, you get the feeling you’re talking to an extremely friendly, hippie version of Hunter S. Thompson...
Lower-case Spielberg
In general, I’m not a big fan of holding artists accountable to the standard set by their best work. Making something “good” after making something “great,” doesn’t mean that the good thing is any less objectively good or that the great thing is any more great. What ...
For ‘Shutter Island,’ the wait may be worthwhile
Movies can be like wine: Once uncorked, they don't often last long on the shelf. But Hollywood history could be a lot kinder to the postponed "Shutter Island," and the movie's last-minute date change might actually work to the thriller's advantage...
Gospel slop
Assembled from spare parts of Footloose and Sister Act, the serviceable gospel contraption Joyful Noise takes place in an economically hard-hit Georgia town, where the multiracial members of the Divinity Church Choir raise voices and spirits under the direction of ...