Screen

Got ham?

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Editor’s note: As of press time, the connection between The Dark Knight Rises and the recent massacre that occurred at the movie theater in Aurora remains unclear...

A patient Western

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At one point in Meek’s Cutoff, set in 1845, the frontier settler played by the excellent, plain-spoken Michelle Williams fires two warning shots after an alarming encounter with a Native American. Hurriedly she loads the rifle with gunpowder and ammunition, while ...

Lonely Hearts’ Club

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Let’s be honest, Love Is All You Need (or Den Skaldede Frisør if Danish is more than a donut to you) is basically redundant escapist fantasy. But when the fantasy services the desires of middle-aged women struggling with uncompassionate husbands and cancer and not ...

‘Spy Next Door’ not worth a ticket

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I'm a lukewarm Jackie Chan fan. He’s been in some terrific films, notably Rush Hour and The Forbidden Kingdom, but he’s also been in a lot of movies that are stupid, including the Rush Hour sequels and the ghastly Around the World in 80 Days...

Top 10 films of the decade

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The first decade of this millennium has been an uncertain one. Terrorist attacks, wars, and financial meltdowns have made us feel vulnerable...

These guys have all the fun

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Somebody asked me, what would be a dream project of yours?” director Douglas Tirola recounts. “I immediately had this vision of a book on my shelf at home that I have had since I was a teenager — the 10th anniversary collection of National Lampoon...

Next-best thing

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Operatic characters are larger than life. Especially when projected on a 20-foot tall movie screen...

UFO snark

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Most modern comedies end up being so stupid that it’s painful to watch the actors embarrass themselves on the big screen. That’s why it’s a pleasure to see comic team Simon Pegg and Nick Frost skewer the alien conspiracy genre in the consistently funny Paul...

Ice, ice maybe

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I’m not saying that the impoverished are going to grab axes and violently murder the wealthy elite. But… Writer/director Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer does what the sci-fi genre does better than any other cinematic medium: examines modern life by asking a surreal “what ...

In need of altar-ations

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Complaining about the length of a film can be a cop-out, a lazy way to avoid dissecting actual content in favor of basically whining about how valuable your free time is. But jokes about The Five-Year Engagement being long enough to legally make its audience common...

More suspense from ‘Whiteout,’ please

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Here's a really cool idea for a film: you're a U.S. Marshal working at a United States research facility in Antarctica, helping keep the peace. Like a campus cop, your primary job is dealing with drunks and minor thefts, but you're hoping that a major crime will ...

Comedy, with flashes of Hughes

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The ghost of John Hughes smiles upon Easy A, a film that freely and giddily borrows from and pays tribute to Hughes’ famous Holy Trinity of ’80s teen angst comedies...