Screen

Tom Cruise’s foreign policy

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If you conceived a child back when Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch, it would now be old enough to tell you to move on. Despite welcoming back rapists and murderers when they win a Super Bowl, modern society seems intent on holding a grudge against a guy who, at ...

Double Take: ‘Source Code’

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When you die, the last eight minutes of your life remain electromagnetically imprinted in your brain. If we could inject someone into that persistent memory, they could solve crimes after the fact. It’s the fascinating premise for director Duncan Jones’ sci-fi ...

Well-seasoned action flick

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After her uninspired acting in the tedious Wanted, I was leery about seeing Angelina Jolie in another action film, though I loved her as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. She’s back in fine form in Salt, however, as tough CIA field agent Evelyn Salt, forced to clear her ...

From flood to film

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Lyons has a new man in town and he’s starting up a film festival. That man is Jake Fink. Fink spent 15 years as a journeyman on film sets, starting out as a production assistant in New York City, before moving on to work for the NHL. A project on alien abduction got ...

Fast, furious fun

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As adolescent male power fantasies go, Fast Five has an undeniable trashy charm...

Corruption of small-town innocence

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They were staples of popular literature, Broadway and the movies long before the movies could talk: comic yarns in which small-town naifs pack their bags and hit the big city, where they learn about life and love and what they’ve been missing...

Hunters becoming hunted

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The 1987 film Predator inspired a number of spinoffs, from the inane (Alien vs. Predator) to the ghastly (Predator 2), and it was definitely time for a reboot before the titular hunter became a tedious cliché. Predators is a nonstop thrill ride of an action film, ...

You’ve seen this film before

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The mystery of Topher Grace’s film career, and why it isn’t better, continues with Take Me Home Tonight...

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...

Myopic biopic

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Biopics are lies. Oh, don’t get me wrong, all storytelling is fundamentally fibbing. But it seems somehow more disingenuous to airbrush actual human histories, to select which warts to ignore and which redemptive moments to exaggerate. Documentaries exist for a ...

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...

Revelations kill the suspense

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A horror movie that works cuts through analysis, shrugs off opinions and snobbery, and eschews complexity — either in technique or in budget. You know it works when the hairs on the back of your neck rise. You know it works when others in the audience — as if moved ...