Screen
Wahlberg pulls through
Playing a reformed cargo smuggler sucked back into the game, Mark Wahlberg is the star of Contraband, a fairly entertaining remake of the 2008 Icelandic thriller Reykjavik-Rotterdam...
Damon’s above the corn
Pap, but easygoing pap with a cast you can live with for a couple of hours, We Bought a Zoo is co-writer and director Cameron Crowe’s adaptation of a memoir by Benjamin Mee entitled We Bought a Zoo: The Amazing True Story of a Young Family, a Broken Down Zoo, and the...
Don’t pity the A-Team
Based on the 1980s TV series of the same name, The A-Team starts with the formation of the team by former Army Rangers. Eighty successful missions later, they’re tricked into recovering stolen U.S. Mint plates that threaten to enable terrorists destroy the nation’s...
Reel to reel | Week of July 4, 2013
20 Feet From StardomIn his compelling new film, director Morgan Neville shines a spotlight on the untold true story of the backup singers behind some of the greatest musical legends of the 21st century. At Mayan...
Mastering the mob mentality
In 1997 Sicilian-born filmmaker Marco Amenta made an hour-long documentary about Rita Atria, the young woman who risked her life by ratting out various members of the Sicilian mob — including members of her own family — pulling the strings and the triggers in the ...
A tale of dirty, stinking apes
What if there was a research drug in the laboratory right now that had a good chance of curing Alzheimer’s but needed more testing on animals before it could be released for human trials? And what if that same drug made its research subjects smarter? That’s the ...
How to make friends
A cross far too many stretches of our movie-going lives, we see movie after movie without seeing one that really moves. At once stealthy and breathlessly paced, The Social Network scoots at a fabulous clip, depicting how its version of Facebook founder Mark ...
Define ‘run’
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 ...
On her own terms
Amy Schumer tries everything. Especially when it comes to shooting a one-night stand for her movie...
Class warfare wedding
So few ensemble-driven African- American films make it to market — whether with familiar faces or unknowns — that the ones that do get out of the gate provoke a weird degree of scrutiny regarding what they have to say about the black experience. Who needs the ...
