Because it didn’t screen for critics, and because of a water-main break in the only New York theater showing the film today, it took me three tries to see John Gulager’s Piranha 3DD. That means I had to walk up to the ticket booth and say “One for Piranha 3DD, please” exactly 3DD times.
That was three times too many.
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Filmmaker Chris Eyre made his name with his 1998 debut Smoke Signals, a delicate indie adapted from a short story by Sherman Alexie about two young men living on the Coeur D'Alene Indian Reservation who go an a road trip to retrieve the belongings of one's recently deceased estranged father. It was a small, wistful thing that offered a look at characters and a community that don't get a lot of time on screen. Hide Away, Eyre's newest work -- since Smoke Signals he's made four features that have mostly headed to TV — is in the same emotional vein as that first film, but heads away from the rez for a setting that's more figurative and characters that are more generic (by choice, though it's also a problem). It's a slender story of mourning that manages some lovely bits of mood while also being dreary and a little preposterous in its spareness.
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Why can’t heroines just be heroines anymore, instead of micromanaged personalities who may as well have the words “Role Model” tattooed across their foreheads? That’s the fate suffered by poor Kristen Stewart as the warrior princess athlete orphan Christ figure Snow White in Snow White and the Huntsman. She’s not just Joan of Arc — she’s Joan of Archetypes.
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High School has such a winning premise that you want to send everyone involved in making it back to the drawing board for a do-over — just take it from the top, folks, and this time everyone actually have a good time.
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If you could distill essence de chat into a few well-chosen pen strokes, you’d end up with something like Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol’s superb animated adventure A Cat in Paris, a picture whose modest demeanor only underscores how expressive and imaginative it is. This isn’t the kind of big-budget animation we get from the major studios: It’s richness of another sort, a feat of hand-drawn animation that relies on spare but succinct character design and a dazzling sense of perspective — rather than a volley of cultural in-jokes — to tell its story. The picture sparkles, but in the nighttime way — its charms have a noirish gleam.
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Although he converted to marry his devoutly Catholic wife in 1926, Graham Greene was famously called to the faith during his time in Mexico, where he exiled himself in 1938, after an over-stimulated review of a Shirley Temple movie threatened him with extradition to the United States on libel charges. It was in Mexico that Greene conceived the first novel in his “Catholic trilogy,” The Power and the Glory, about a priest on the run during the Cristero War.
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The premise of Chernobyl Diaries, in which a group of twentysomething tourists are menaced by malevolent beings while paying a visit to Pripyat, the abandoned Ukrainian town that used to house workers at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, has been described by some as uncomfortably exploitative of a real-life tragedy. But real-life tragedies bleed through into horror cinema all the time — the genre is frequently a reflection of subconscious dread and anxiety, from the nuclear detonation-born Godzilla menacing a Japan less than a decade after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the monster that attacked New York in Cloverfield, 54 years later, in a wash of imagery reminiscent of 9/11.
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It would be very easy to show up here and report that Men in Black 3 has no reason to exist, that it’s just another threequel that didn’t have to be made. The truth is a little more complicated: Men in Black 3 — which was, like its two predecessors, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld — is neither as much fun as the first picture in the series nor as totally useless as the second. It has an actual story line, one that’s quite moving in places. And it features a bit of casting that’s pure genius. Men in Black 3 is almost good enough to make you care about its existence. And yet not quite.
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Whenever I throw away one of those large round plastic lids from an orange-juice jug, in my head I hear my mother saying, as she would have said to my 8-year-old self, “That would make a great table-top for a doll’s house.” As an adult I don’t have a dollhouse, but I still have a hard time throwing away those orange-juice lids; the mentality dies hard. So why — with one luminous exception — can’t I love the movies of Wes Anderson, the most dollhousey of all filmmakers? Why, specifically, can’t I love Moonrise Kingdom, a sweet-natured picture set in 1965 on a mythical New Englandy island, in which two oddball kids run away together and pledge undying love?
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The Intouchables hits so many audience-pleasing buttons, meticulously and dutifully, that it ought to be called The Irresistibles. This is the French movie you’ve been hearing about, a megahit in its native country and currently spreading across Europe like a cheerful, robust strain of flu. Based on a true story about a wheelchair-bound rich guy and his caretaker, a small-time crook from the projects, The Intouchables is a movie about life, love and the enduring power of Earth Wind & Fire. You have been forewarned.
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Dustin Lance Black spoke of his conservative Mormon upbringing when he won the 2009 Oscar for best original screenplay for Milk, and traces of that childhood are all over his most recent directorial effort Virginia, a garbled coming-of-age story and portrait of a mentally ill mother. The titular character, played by a blonde Jennifer Connelly, suffers from traumatic onset schizophrenia — she's a fey, childlike woman who lives alone with her protective teenage son Emmett (Harrison Gilbertson) and has been carrying on a decades-long affair with the town sheriff Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), a devout Mormon who's married with kids.
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Some days you just need to see, as SCTV’s Farm Film Report guys Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok used to put it, stuff blowed up real good. If you’re having one of those days, Peter Berg’s Battleship is as good a choice as any. Beyond that, you should know a few things going in: Battleship is allegedly based on the Hasbro game of the same name, but never in the film is the line “You sunk my battleship!” uttered, so don’t expect a refund. Also, one of the invading aliens – spoiler, sorry! – looks a little like the guy from that ’90s Swedish band Stakka Bo.
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A former grifter gets out of prison after serving 25 years for killing his partner in The Samaritan, and in a tale as old as time (or at least as old as the movies), tries to go straight, only to get pulled in for one last job. His name is Foley, and he's played by Samuel L. Jackson, and this film from Canadian director David Weaver is svelte enough in its reassembling of familiar elements to be, for a while, as comfortably pleasant as sipping on what once used to be your go-to drink — until The Samaritan takes a jarring turn right out of Park Chan-wook, and from there takes a tumble into ludicrousness from which it doesn't recover.
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Hollywood, a humble request? I realize that abortion is has become too divisive a topic these days to drop into a mainstream movie product like What To Expect When You're Expecting, especially in what's an overall innocuous ensemble comedy based, somehow, on a bestselling pregnancy guidebook (between this and Battleship, it's one strange week for source material). It's also a tough topic from which to wring laughs. And in something carefully calculated to be as broad in appeal as possible, any mention of the option of terminating a pregnancy is just going to be one more thing that could isolate potential movie audiences, like an ugly poster, being in a foreign language or attempting analysis of the Iraq War.
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Anyone who’s ever seen or used a rabbit vibrator can attest to the device’s utter adorableness as a totem. Whoever designed this miraculous pink rubbery thing, with its Peter Cottontail-worthy quivering ears, probably thought, Why does a vibrator have to be ugly? Why not make it cute? Tanya Wexler may have had the same idea when she was making Hysteria, a romantic comedy and highly fictionalized history of the vibrator. The picture is, in places, too adorable for words, and when it’s not adorable, it suffers from an excess of neo-suffragette preachiness. But the picture is at least spirited, a jaunty trifle that’s low on eroticism but high on cartoony coquettishness. Like the little motorized whatsit that is its subject, it does have its charms.
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