We’ve come to the point where hand-drawn animation almost seems like a forgotten art, lost in the gaudy shuffle of motion-capture slickness a la The Adventures of Tintin and the sleek technical sophistication of pictures like Rango and Kung-Fu Panda 2. That’s why it’s such a glorious relief to greet the arrival of an old-school -– but very grown-up -- animated picture like Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal and Tono Errando’s Chico & Rita, a romance that opens in late-1940s Cuba and uses a thumbnail history of midcentury Latin jazz as its backdrop.
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If it takes you a beat to remember the movie to which Journey 2 is a follow-up, that may not just be because the makers have opted for a trimmer title than, say, the marquee-busting, geographically confusing Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Mysterious Island.
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Even though it's something of a slick mess, Madonna's W.E. is just the kind of movie you'd expect from an artist who once, with a delightful lack of irony, declared herself a material girl. A weirdly sympathetic portrait of Wallis Simpson, the woman for whom a king gave up his throne, W.E. is the story of a life told through stuff: Evening gloves, cocktail shakers, baubles from Cartier, little hats trimmed with netting. It's as if Madonna went back in time and forgot to talk to actual people, to find out how they lived and what they thought -- but she sure did a lot of shopping.
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The allegory-rich Chronicle opens with a kind of generational statement: “I bought a camera,” senior class punching bag Andrew (Dane DeHaan) says, “and I’m filming everything from here on out.” Andrew is talking to his father (Michael Kelly), a drunkard ex-fireman who punishes his son for the stress of caring for his dying wife, though the announcement is meant for us as well. Chronicle fits into the growing genre of “found footage” films, though that becomes just one formal element of many director Josh Trank meshes together to put a new spin on the subject of teenage alienation and its more extreme social side effects.
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The pleasures of the period ghost story The Woman in Black are something like the creepy shiver of delight you get from Edward Gorey’s illustrated poem The Gashlycrumb Tinies, which describes horrific deaths suffered by innocents of yore (“I is for Ida who drowned in a lake/J is for James who took lye by mistake”), accompanied by heavily crosshatched drawings of wan moppets wearing black cotton stockings and mournful expressions. Terrible things happen in The Woman in Black: Children are snatched from their parents by the Grim Reaper, nurseries become insane asylums and numerous unseen nasties go bump in the night. But director James Watkins has just the right touch with the polishing cloth: The picture has the soft, dark gleam of a piece of Victorian mourning jewelry, and its gloom is always offered with a wink.
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Everyone wants to be the one to discover the next low-budget and/or indie supernatural shocker, the stylish, wicked little thing that scares the bejesus out of you and sends you running to your friends, saying, “You’ve gotta see this!” UK filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s Kill List isn’t that wicked little thing -- not by a long shot. Yet it’s a frustrating case. Wheatley drops enough unnerving bread crumbs in the first two-thirds to leave you wondering where the hell he’s headed, and even the big finale should be satisfying enough: It just belongs to a different movie, and it’s unsettling in a way that doesn’t feel earned.
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There’s a big old mammal heart beating softly but steadily at the center of Big Miracle, which recounts the true story of how, in 1988, humans from all over the world raced to save three California gray whales trapped by rapidly forming Arctic Circle ice. The whales’ plight made great television footage, captivating viewers everywhere; it also galvanized plenty of people who wanted to use their alleged or sort-of genuine concern for these poor creatures as a political tool or a means to financial gain. With whale-sized good intentions, Big Miracle works hard to capture the drama of the situation and also sweep an adequate quota of feel-good vibes into its wide-ranging net.
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The heroes and heroines of old-fashioned ghost-story flicks resemble the average horror fan more closely than any other of the genre’s archetypes. Amateur ghostbusters like The Innkeepers’s Claire (Sara Paxton), for instance, troll spooky hallways and scour dank basements for thrills, which is to say without the real threat of physical harm. We go to movies like The Innkeepers, Ti West’s follow-up to his delightful old-school creep-out The House of the Devil, to explore and experience fear from a similarly safe remove. Like the average horror fan, Claire can be her own worst enemy; on both sides of the screen, much depends on the question of whether one can be scared to death.
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One for the Money feels like the forgotten pilot for a TV show that wasn't picked up for series. Watch as Stephanie Plum (Katherine Heigl), Trenton divorcee-turned-bounty hunter, hunts down bail skippers in her high heels while trying to choose between troubled cop Joe Morelli (Jason O'Mara) and badass fellow bond agent Ranger (Daniel Sunjata) -- Tuesdays on USA! more »
It’s so hard to find a reasonably enjoyable thriller these days that anything with a marginally intriguing premise and fewer than 10 plot holes has come to seem like a minor miracle. Man on a Ledge might have been that kind of modest miracle: Sam Worthington stars as Nick Cassidy, a pissed-off ex-cop who’s been convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. Somehow – and the whole of Man on a Ledge deals with the whys and wherefores of that somehow – he springs himself from Sing Sing, suits up in some phenomenally nice-looking threads, and checks himself (under an assumed name) into a room on one of the upper floors of a midtown Manhattan luxury hotel. After a room-service breakfast of champagne, lobster and French fries, he creeps out onto the ledge and greets the cops who respond to the call with some very specific demands.
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Wolves, like most animals, know a lot of things that humans don’t. When bad white men move onto their turf to do bad white-man stuff – like drilling for oil – they instinctively know something’s amiss in the balance of nature, and damned if they’re going to just sit back in their dens and fuhgeddaboutit. In The Grey, wolves unleash their fury at mankind in a bloody yet tasteful flurry of stamping paws and gnashing teeth; mankind fights back as best he can, which in this particular case, is not very well.
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Parts of Valérie Donzelli’s Declaration of War, which details a young couple’s struggle to keep their lives together in the face of their child’s illness, are bracingly intimate and believable. Yet there’s so much filmmaking packed around them that they flicker and fade before you know it: Between the Truffautish voice-overs and Jacques Demy-style musical interludes, it’s a wonder anyone in this sort-of drama, sort-of comedy ever gets any rest.
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It can be difficult to remember who we're meant to be rooting for in the Underworld universe, with its unending werewolf/vampire feud, betrayals, hybrids, bloodlines, forbidden romances and immortal daddy issues. But that's OK: Underworld: Awakening sloughs off much of the convoluted gothic backstory of the first three films in the series in favor of skipping forward a dozen years and landing vinyl-clad bloodsucking heroine Selene (Kate Beckinsale) in a near future in which the world has gone into martial law lockdown after the discovery of non-humans in their midst.
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There are instances when reviewing intentions would be so much easier than reviewing actual movies, and Red Tails, which was directed by first-timer Anthony Hemingway but conceived, shaped and willed into being by George Lucas, is one of them. Red Tails is – or is intended to be – a rousing comic-book adventure based loosely on real-life events: The picture follows a group of Tuskegee Airmen as they shoot down German fighter planes and blow munitions transport trains to smithereens. In between missions, they fight more personal battles, against insidious racism and bigotry.
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The brilliant haute spy character Modesty Blaise – created by British author Peter O’Donnell in 1963 and kept alive, through 2002, in a series of comic books and novels – has been botched on film so many times that those of us who love this urbane, intuitive temptress (with a flair for hand-to-hand combat) have mostly given up hope. Joseph Losey first missed the target with the 1966 Modesty Blaise; Scott Spiegel took another wobbly shot with the 2004 direct-to-video My Name Is Modesty: A Modesty Blaise Adventure. But the spirit of Modesty lives, by another name and in a different sort of story, in Stephen Soderbergh’s stylish, quietly exhilarating Haywire, which features mixed martial-arts star Gina Carano as a hit person with a smoldering, deadpan gaze and nutcracker thighs. She also, as it happens, looks killer in a cocktail dress.
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