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REVIEW: Feral Kid Horror 'Mama' Is Jessica Chastain's Best Performance Yet

In Tree of Life, Jessica Chastain played a mother who could float. In Mama, she's attacked by one. Chastain shot this dignified little thriller in fall 2011 during the stretch when literally every arthouse theater played at least two of her pictures—between Tree, Coriolanus, The Help, Take Shelter, Texas Killing Fields and The Debt, she was indie cinema's inescapable new queen. Universal intended to release the Guillermo del Toro-produced Mama last October, but shelved it until the week after Chastain was nominated for an Oscar for Zero Dark Thirty. Is this her reputation-besmirching Norbit? Pshaw — for my money, it's her best performance yet.
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REVIEW: Arnold Schwarzenegger Is Back In Dumb, Fun 'Last Stand'

“Welcome to Sommerton!” growls Arnold Schwarzenegger in his comeback flick, the ultra-bloody shoot-em-up The Last Stand. As Arnie catchphrases go, it's no “Hasta la vista, baby” — hell, it's not even a “Consider this a divorce” — but it's been 10 years since the Terminator starred in a movie and we'll take what we can get.
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REVIEW: Jewish Mom-Com 'The Guilt Trip' Scolds Like The Real Thing

The Guilt Trip is a film as familiar as a mother’s voice, in more ways than one. Playing a frustrated son and his overbearing mother, Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand elevate a formulaic script with their easygoing chemistry in this road-trip mom com. They produce as many laughs as they do cringes, but the film’s feel-good message is undermined by its ultimate purpose: As a vindication of the rights of Jewish mothers to annoy their children as much as they please.
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REVIEW: Lee Child's 'Jack Reacher' Falls Prey To The Tom Cruise Paradox

Jack Reacher, protagonist of Lee Child's brilliant series of airport pulp, has sold nearly 40 million books. He's also blonde, ugly, 6'5” and 250 lbs, which means the difference between the Reacher that fans love and Tom Cruise, who plays him in his long-awaited film debut, is literally sizable: Ten inches and 90 lbs, to be exact, and a whole lot of handsome. Child's Jack Reacher is homeless, and for the well-coiffed Cruise, playing a guy who shops as Goodwill is as much of a stretch as hoping no one will notice his larger-than-life ex-military cop is barely taller than his co-star Rosamund Pike. (Which in real life, he's not — Pike towers over him by two inches.)
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REVIEW: Apatow Grows Up, Takes A Step Back With Messy 'This Is 40'

This is 40 ends with a title card saying that it's "Based on characters created by Judd Apatow." While this is true — the film's about Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), who were supporting figures in Apatow's 2007 hit Knocked Up — it also feels like it might be more accurate for it to declare "Based on Judd Apatow." It doesn't just star his wife Mann, it features their daughters Maude and Iris as her children, and it's not hard to read Rudd's character as an Apatow proxy who's struggling through the world of music instead of, these days, riding high in comedy.
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REVIEW: Lizzy Caplan's Hipster Commitment-Phobe Carries Relationship Drama 'Save The Date'

Save the Date, the new film from director Michael Mohan (One Too Many Mornings), is a neat, lightweight little hipster romance about commitment issues between people barely ready to confront what they want, much less tell others about it. (I hate to use the h-word, but there's really no avoiding it when talking about a film in which an artist/bookstore employee breaks up with a guy in a band and starts dating a marine biologist who's been mooning over her at work.) more »

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REVIEW: Michael Haneke's Amour A Beautifully Calculated Demise

Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke has a distinctively aggressive relationship with his audience that ranges from the provocation of Caché and The Piano Teacher to the outright antagonism of Funny Games and Benny's VideoAmour, his latest work and the winner of the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, might be considered Haneke's version of a love story, and its grimness is of a much quieter but no less impactful sort. It is, more than any of Haneke's previous work, infused with compassion, but of a sort that cuts like a knife. For all that it is, as promised, about love, it's also a subtly punishing affair that grinds you into the ground as you watch an elderly couple deal with one member's slow deterioration of health and sanity.
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REVIEW: Tarantino's Django Unchained A Bloody But Bloated Affair

Quentin Tarantino continues his quest to fight history's great oppressors by way of the movies in Django Unchained. Inglourious Basterds conjured up a squadron of tough Jewish-American soldiers who took Nazi scalps and chased down Hitler with the help of a French Jewish theater owner, a British film critic turned lieutenant and a Allies-affiliated German movie star. Django Unchained doesn't literally bring the forces of cinema to bear against slavery in the same fashion, but it does use tropes of Spaghetti Westerns and exploitation films to build the character of a former slave who learns to shoot and eventually faces down the residents of a plantation in order to retrieve his wife. There's something inarguably rousing about Tarantino's exuberant revisionist history, about the way he rewrites wretched eras in the past so that those who suffered are able to have their bloody revenge.
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'Les Misérables' Hits High Notes, But Also Skitters

I feel I have to confess to a certain partisanship. I grew up listening to Les Misérables. I've seen it performed twice and as a girl had the original Broadway cast recording down cold. It's been years since I've heard it, but watching Tom Hooper's adaptation of Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil, Jean-Marc Natel and Herbert Kretzmer's musical I realized with amusement and discomfiture that I could still sing along to just about every damn word, at least until whomever was sitting near me took it upon themselves to murder me for the greater good. These songs — and the bridges in between, for Les Misérables is a sung-through affair with almost no spoken dialogue — are permanently etched in my psyche, and I am as far from being able to look at this material with critical distance as a highly trained stage star is from an actual consumptive 1800s French urchin.

That said, can we admit that Les Misérables is an absolute beast of a musical? It faces the impossible task of compressing Victor Hugo's 1500-page novel into three hours (the screen version running a leaner 157 minutes), starting in a prison in the south of France in 1815 before leaping ahead to the town of Montreuil in 1823 and then Paris in 1832, where the main action takes place against the backdrop of the June Rebellion. It's the story of ex-convict Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), but it has a notable array of other significant characters to be dealt with, ones who love and suffer and (quite frequently) die, and all with musical accompaniment. The signature staging of the play involved a giant turntable that allowed for more fluid scene changes. On screen, that can be accompanied efficiently with an edit, but then you have to deal with the fact that smooshing a whole storyline about Valjean giving up a chance to let a stranger go down for his crimes and choosing to go on the run again ("Who Am I? / The Trial") looks incredibly rushed when taken out of the abstract.

In staging Les Misérables for screen, Hooper has taken a relatively naturalistic and grounded approach to the musical, a choice that's better suited to the subject matter of the story than to the fact that it takes place entirely in song. The vocals were recorded live on set, the backdrops are grimy in a poetic period Gallic style and the big numbers are frequently recorded in close-up, the camera holding on intimate shots of the performers as they stand or sit and sing. The film (which was shot by Danny Cohen, who also served as cinematographer on The King's Speech) treats its songs as it would dialogue, except that dialogue rarely involves spouting about one's feelings at length out loud to no one, a tic that makes much more sense set to music. It's an infuriatingly static way to shoot musical numbers, and it diminishes the bombastic grandeur many of these songs have. 

Éponine (singer and stage actress Samantha Barks) belts out her anguish about her unrequited love while huddled against a pillar; on the big sequence "One Day More" we cut abruptly between different faces as if everyone's in their own individual music video. It's only Russell Crowe in the role of Javert, the police inspector who's devoted his life to chasing down Valjean, who gets the kind of grandiose staging the material demands in his two big songs, as he wanders along prominent Parisian landmarks and the camera swings out to take in the city.

Crowe is, perhaps not coincidentally, the weakest singer, and despite his musical side career looks uncomfortable in the role of Javert, his concentration all seeming to go toward his serviceable warbling rather than acting. But much of the rest of the cast is terrific, particularly not-so-secret theater geeks Jackman and Anne Hathaway, who settle into their roles like they've spent their lives waiting for this opportunity. Hathaway's in fact so good as Fantine, the factory worker forced into prostitution to support her daughter Cosette near the start of the story, that the film staggers a bit after her character departs, her killer rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" one of its emotional highlights. 

Eddie Redmayne's a pleasant surprise as Marius, the idealistic student torn between his love for the grown Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) and his desire to join his friends at the barricades for the uprising — the lovers tend to be the two blandest characters in the ensemble, but he finds a genuine gallantry and sweetness to the would-be revolutionary. Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, on the other hand, play designated comic relief couple the Thénardiers even broader than that description would suggest — though "Master of the House" is one of the most dynamically staged of the songs, the tonal difference between their appearances and the rest of the film is jolting.

Even at a generous running time that matches this season's other giant award candidates, Les Misérables seems like it's in a hurry, skittering from one number to the next without interlude. After Hathaway's early high point, it starts to feel numbing, an unending barrage of musical emoting carrying us through Valjean's adopting of Cosette, the latter's first encounter with Marius, the battle at the barricade and a last hour that can feel like it's a non-stop series of death arias. But even if this isn't a great screen adaptation of the musical, there's no resisting the ending, which pairs the film's two brightest stars and then has everyone join in on a reprise of "Do You Hear The People Sing?" Say, do you hear the distant drums? Maybe not, but at that moment the voices coming from the screen and the tune they're crooning are rousing enough to draw a few tears.

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REVIEW: Kathryn Bigelow's Angular 'Zero Dark Thirty' Is A Stunning, Riveting Achievement

Kathryn Bigelow's angular thriller Zero Dark Thirty begins and ends with events that have been seared into public memory — the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the death of Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, two incidents that bookended a decade in which America's sense of security and place in the world were radically shaken. more »

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REVIEW: Brad Pitt Makes One Glorious Bastard In Stylish, Self-Conscious 'Killing Them Softly'

Killing Them Softly is set in Boston, maybe. Someone mentions living in Somerville, a scattering of the characters have the accent, and they talk about going down to Florida. But the film was shot in New Orleans, often in the industrial edges still ragged from Hurricane Katrina, and the only people who seem to inhabit its universe are gangsters — high level ones with pretentions of civility and hardscrabble losers struggling to get a few dollars together by way of hazardous schemes. more »

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REVIEW: Marion Cotillard Bares Everything In Exceptional, Bittersweet 'Rust and Bone'

Director Jacques Audiard's nifty 2009 prison epic A Prophet took a classic arc — the rise of a young man through a criminal world — and found in it something bracing and transformative: an anti-hero for a diverse and changing France. His deeply enjoyable new feature Rust and Bone also feels like a fresh reworking of an older mode of filmmaking; the swooning romantic melodrama shaped by tragedy. more »

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REVIEW: Crouching Tiger, Condescending Director Make For Frustrating 'Life Of Pi'

Ang Lee's Life of Pi is a doubled-edged argument for the transcendent capabilities of film. Its central section uses the latest technological achievements to transform the fantastical, fable-like tale of Yann Martel's award-winning novel into some of the most innovative and wondrous images to flicker across the big screen this year. And in its framing story, one it returns to periodically as if needing to keep the audience from getting too caught up in the gorgeous abstraction of its narrative at sea, it provides a reminder of why we should trust more in those images, as it ploddingly trots out its source material's heavy-handed and unnecessary delineation of its own themes.
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REVIEW: 'Anna Karenina' Is So Wright It's Wrong − Beautiful To Behold But Empty Inside

There's a five-minute tracking shot in the middle of Joe Wright's 2007 film Atonement that is impossible to forget once you've seen it. A wounded Robbie (James McAvoy) is on the beach at Dunkirk, waiting to be evacuated, and in a nightmarish, beautiful single Steadicam take he wanders past crowds of soldiers, burning cars, horses being shot, a beached ship, a choir singing, the ferris wheel still spinning in the ruined background. It's a mind-boggling piece of work, requiring immaculate timing and choreography, and it takes you right out of the movie because it's there to show off.   more »

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REVIEW: Less-Than-Sterling 'Silver Linings Playbook' Shines During Messy Family Moments

It speaks to just how good David O. Russell is at portraying raw, high-strung sincerity that Silver Linings Playbook is able to walk a line between likable and tolerable despite a premise the reeks of quirky bullshit.  In addition to its frequently cutesy treatment of mental illness, the movie features a love interest who instantly latches onto and pursues the film's mess of a hero like she read the script in advance and was assured things will eventually work out. more »