Apparently starring in terrible VOD genre movies is becoming a family business, because both Nicolas Cage’s son and his nephew show up in Get Gone, a laughably inept horror movie with a plot ripped right out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes and their dozens of imitators, delivered without any suspense […]
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Harvey Weinstein’s name is never mentioned in The Assistant, Kitty Green’s narrative feature debut, but his presence permeates every frame. The timing of the film’s release, with the impending trial and recent fall from grace of one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, is inadvertently incendiary. And yet there is nothing sensational within the film itself, […]
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It’s been nearly 25 years since Miami police detectives Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) first teamed up to shoot bad guys and destroy property in Bad Boys. How long ago was 1995? So long ago that back then, Martin Lawrence got top billing. There was a sequel in between — 2003’s […]
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Perhaps the most infuriating thing about Dolittle is that somewhere beneath its inappropriate jokes, poorly developed characters and Robert Downey Jr.’s bizarre acting choices, there’s a whiff of a good movie that could have been. Stephen Gaghan’s mess of a family film — which was attracting bad buzz well before its release — has some […]
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I never had a TV set in my room when I was growing up, so I’d have to sneak past my parents’ bedroom door, creep down the thickly carpeted stairs, and quietly settle into the ugly plaid couch in the family room (in New Jersey) or the basement (in Nebraska) when I had trouble sleeping. There […]
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In 1977, NASA scientists put out the word that they’d be recording greetings from people from around the world and sending them (the recordings) into space to welcome any potential aliens who happened by. That announcement is the jumping-off point for Troop Zero, an utterly delightful family comedy set in the backwater town of Wiggly, […]
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The Time: The mid-’90sThe Place: Downtown New York CityThe Setting: A nondescript warehouse/film studioThe Scene: “Ellen and Damian Kiss” When it arrives, the blow-up has been a long time coming. Ever since he showed up on the set of the indie film he’s agreed to be in, egotistical actor Chad Palomino has been a source […]
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The opening scene of Gille Klabin’s The Wave promises an edgy head-trip of a movie, as main character Frank (Justin Long) describes a drug that’s meant to simulate what happens in the brain in the moments just before death, and how taking this drug in an experimental trial had a profound effect on one of […]
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No matter how hard they work, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, and John Travolta can only star in so many direct-to-VOD thrillers a year, so someone has to pick up the slack. Guy Pearce is that someone in Disturbing the Peace, a cheap, shoddy action movie from director York Alec Shackleton, whose only previous feature (2018’s […]
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If cinema is, as Roger Ebert famously put it, a machine that generates empathy, the camera is its motor. What a director, editor, and cinematographer choose to show an audience, and the way they choose to frame it, communicates volumes about a movie’s themes and the filmmakers’ position on them. Sam Mendes’ WWI drama 1917 […]
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It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: Three Jesus Christs walk into a mental hospital, each claiming to be the real thing. But there’s nothing funny about Jon Avnet’s dreary period drama Three Christs, which is based on a real-life 1959 study about three paranoid schizophrenics in Michigan who all believed themselves to […]
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The modern cinematic history of athlete cameos begins with a 7-foot-2 “airline pilot” grabbing a kid’s shirtfront like it’s a Kleenex. While no one would ever accuse Airplane! (1980) of realism, there’s a nugget of truth to NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s masquerading as co-pilot Roger Murdoch in the 1980 disaster spoof. In the scene, a […]
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