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Brutality depicted

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New rule: You can watch Django Unchained as many times as you want, but you have to watch 12 Years a Slave at least once first...

Slop disguised as fun

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In its own sweetly bombastic way, the 2008 remake of Journey to the Center of the Earth did the job, the job being a 21st-century 3-D bash starring Brendan Fraser — an actor who gives his all to the green screen, every time — and loosely based on the 19th-century ...

Are you awake?

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The folks at Microsoft announced Alan Wake back in 2005, hyping how the game would change the face of gaming. Wish they let us know we would have to wait five years for the game, during which Gears of War, Grand Theft Auto IV and Modern Warfare have already changed ...

Stilled action

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Like passionless martial coitus or a zombie doing Zumba, Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass simply go through the motions with Jason Bourne, a...

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 ...

‘This isn’t a comic book’

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Writer/director Jeff Wadlow’s Kick-Ass 2 is “morning radio shock jock” offensive, which is a thematic departure from the source material written by Mark Millar. But is it better to flinch from the vile, reprobate, misogynistic glee of Millar’s comic miniseries or to ...

Abridged and confusing

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In a future where the government keeps a tight rein on the populace, the annual reminder of an earlier failed uprising is The Hunger Games, a televised battle to the death of teens chosen from each of 12 districts. When her young sister Prim (Willow Shields) is ...

Thanks, Morgan Freeman

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I’ll be honest, in the spirit of the honestly shameless heartwarmer Dolphin Tale. I saw it in a somewhat distracted, agitated state...

‘Sherlock Holmes’ looks good, but no reinvention

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I've been a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detail-oriented detective, Sherlock Holmes, for as long as I can remember. The Holmes canon is extraordinarily rich and directors as talented as Billy Wilder and Barry Levinson have tackled it with varying levels ...

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 ...

Like a Joss

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This was going to be a rabid, frothing defense of the superhero genre, complete with impassioned pleas that appealed to cinematic intellectuals who are apt to dismiss such films. But Tom Hiddleston, who ironically plays the evil Loki in The Avengers, got there first...

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, ...