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movie reviews

Beyond the Hills

6

Cosmina Stratan

Directed by: Cristian Mungiu

Young nuns cooped up in a monastery. Lustful yearnings. The hint of demonic possession. What seems like the makings of a tawdry horror show becomes a subtle and moving exploration into the sacred and profane. The miracle worker here is Christian Mungiu, the Romanian writer-director who helped put his country’s cinema on the map with 2007’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, a firebomb about illegal abortion. Beyond the Hills plays it closer inside, timed to the beat of bruised hearts. ... | More »

February 28, 2013

Stoker

6

Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode, Mia Wasikowska

Directed by: Park Chan-wook

If you haven't turned on to the cinematic fever dreams of South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook – I'm obsessed with Oldboy, Thirst and Joint Security Area – Stoker makes a great gateway drug. It's Park's first film in English. But it hasn't slowed him down. Stoker is Park's darkly funny, deliciously depraved riff on Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, in which a young girl bonds with her serial-killer uncle. The deft script, by actor Wentworth Miller ... | More »

February 21, 2013

No

7

Gael Garcia Bernal

Directed by: Pablo Larrain

What if you could stomp on your stronger, meaner, better-financed opponents with a smart ad campaign? No, I'm not talking about the Oscars. I'm talking about No, a stinging, brutally funny satire of modern politics from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain that ads up to lesson on how to defeat a despot with a Smile button. Ad exec Rene Saavedra (Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal is stellar) is thrown when his boss Lucho (Alfredo Castro) hands him the unenviable assignment of taking on G... | More »

February 14, 2013

A Good Day to Die Hard

2

Bruce Willis, Jai Courtney

Directed by: John Moore

Ah jeez. I actually wanted this one to be good. Or at least decent. Or at least a reminder of what got us all fired up about the first Die Hard in 1988. But A Good Day To Die Hard, the fifth in a creatively exhausted series, is total crap. Bruce Willis is back as the NYPD's John McClane. But now he's in Russia to free his son, Jack (Jai Courtney), from the clutches of baddies. Call it Die Hard Does 'Taken'. Of course, Sonny Boy (nicely played by Courtney) is a good guy. B... | More »

Beautiful Creatures

4

Alden Ehrenreich, Alice Englert, Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, Emma Thompson

Directed by: Richard LaGravenese

It starts sweetly, kind of. Young love blooms between Ethan Wate (Alden Ehrenreich), a literati wannabe stuck in small-town, small-minded Gatlin, South Carolina, and Lena Duchannes (Alice Englert), a visiting witch. Much is made of the two reading and quoting Kurt Vonnegut, Henry Miller and the street poetry of Charles Bukowski. It's all southern-fried bullshit, of course. The two bond best over pop culture references, such as Lloyd Dobler and his boombox in Say Anything. Ethan has this ... | More »

February 6, 2013
February 1, 2013

Sound City

7

Directed by: Dave Grohl

Straight out of a roofraising debut at Sundance 2013 comes Dave Grohl’s exhilarating documentary about what makes life worth living. Hold up. I know Grohl’s film is actually a look at Sound City (1969 - 2011), a studio buried in a corner of Van Nuys, California, as it moves from legend to the analog boneyard. But the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer is up to something more than a nostalgia trip. He wants to celebrate the nondigital sweat that goes into making music... | More »

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