Screen

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 May 10, 2012

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ALL ABOUT ACTRESSES A woman director wants to make a documentary about actresses, all actresses: the popular ones, the unknown, the intellectuals, the comics and the forgotten ...Filming absolutely everything, with or without their permission, the director will be...

‘Howl’ is arty and difficult, and exactly right for the Sundance...

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PARK CITY, Utah — We were not even four hours into Sundance John Cooper-style...

‘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 ...

Dull expectations

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When an idiosyncratic talent seeks a wider audience for her work, there’s a danger in trading the offbeat for something more on-the-nose. This is what has happened in Friends With Kids, a smooth but frustrating third feature with an extremely good ensemble cast. In ...

Falling down 12 steps

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The ubiquitous hyperbolic after-school-special type of dramatization of the perils of alcoholism has lost its teeth; it no longer delivers a social bite so much as it gets drool everywhere. Thus, in many ways, what Smashed wanted to do is something necessary, as we ...

film

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ELAIN STRITCH: SHOOT ME...

Chaotic, but ‘Pirate Radio’ works

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Richard Curtis makes romantic, sentimental and overlong...

Delightful con artists

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Sean-Pierre Jeunet hasn’t directed many films, but they’ve all been terrific, distinctive and stylish. Two you’ll hopefully have enjoyed already are The City of Lost Children and the weird Amélie. With Micmacs (original title Micmacs à tire-larigot) Jeunet moves ...

Define ‘run’

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At this point, there is just one Liam Neeson movie: Taken a Non-Stop Run All Night to Walk Among the Tombstones 3. Neeson isn’t in the midst of some Nicolas Cage supernova, in which an actor’s need to perpetually work and “get dat paper” creates an acting black hole ...

reel to reel | Week of June 30, 2011

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  Another Earth...

‘Armored’: Terrible tough guys

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Ever wonder what kind of guy drives an armored car full of cash? Yeah, I never did either, but that’s the environment that Armored presents us with: a bunch of edgy, tough-guy losers who somehow have ended up as employees of Eagle Shield Security...