There's a snag of resistance at the start of Into the Abyss, Werner Herzog's new documentary about the execution of Michael Perry, the 2001 triple homicide he was convicted of (but never confessed to) with Jason Burkett, and the relatives of their victims. The film opens with a shot of a cemetery filled with identical white crosses where the unclaimed bodies of inmates are buried, and an interview with the man standing in front of it, Reverend Richard Lopez, a clergyman for death row inmates in Huntsville, Texas. He tears up as he talks about counseling men who are about to be given a lethal injection, about how, with their permission, he holds their ankle as they're on the gurney so that they have the comfort of human contact as they pass.
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The great news about A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas is that it features some of the most original 3-D effects this side of Avatar: Raw-egg splatter comin' right at ya, shockeroo Claymation penises that'll rock your world, nativity Jesuses blasting into the sky and lots of mystical-looking marijuana smoke wafting straight off the screen and into your very own lungs, visually speaking at least.
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For every musical act that's made it big, there are thousands that have languished in obscurity, but when it comes to movies, it's rare that a band that comes to naught gets much screen time. Achtung Baby celebrates it's 20 year anniversary this month, and joining the chorus of reminiscences about U2's legacy and impact is Killing Bono, a slightly sour Irish comedy about not making it big directed by Nick Hamm (Godsend) and based on Neil McCormick's memoir Killing Bono: I Was Bono's Doppelganger.
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Brett Ratner has long been the whipping boy for everything that's wrong with big, dumb Hollywood entertainments. There's just one problem: He's actually good at making dumb stuff, and now that Hollywood entertainments have gotten even bigger without showing any signs of getting smarter, with a Ratner movie, at least you can be confident you're in the hands of a master.
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Sometimes there are one or two or three things in a movie that seem wholly implausible: For example, characters who, in 2011, don't use or even appear to own cell phones. Depending on the movie -- and the necessity of cell phones to the story -- you might find that one little glitch unforgivable or you might look the other way. But what if a movie has so many glitches, so many careless oversights, that looking the other way only brings on whiplash? The characters in Dito Montiel's The Son of No One use cell phones, all right. But almost nothing else in the movie makes sense. It's as if Montiel, who also wrote the script, came up with a cool idea and then had no idea how to spin it out into an even minimally plausible story.
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"You might say hey, maybe punk rock was never meant to grow up -- but it did, so too bad. We're in uncharted territory," Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz, also the owner of Epitaph Records, says early in Andrea Blaugrund's documentary The Other F Word. Billing itself as a "coming of middle age story," this earnest and intermittently lovable look into the lives of prominent punk rockers who've gone on to become responsible fathers doesn't break as much ground as it seems to hope and believe.
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Alfred Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille might have been able to successfully redo their own movies, but more recent auto-remakes, especially ones that find directors cranking out a U.S. version of their own foreign-language hit, have been a motley crew. The best, like Michael Haneke's 2007 Funny Games and Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge, tend to be merely functional enterprises that revisit what worked the first time around with added English-speaking and possibly more famous actors. But others highlight in a painfully clear way the compromises that so often come with working in Hollywood. Ole Bornedal's wan Nightwatch lost the nasty edge of the Danish original and retained no other distinguishing characteristics, and George Sluizer's 1993 The Vanishing ditched the finale of his 1988 Spoorloos, an uncompromisingly bleak and great ending, for a studio-friendly happy one that undoes everything toward which the first film built.
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After years of watching Johnny Depp give performances from behind thick rings of pirate eyeliner or masks of outlandish Tim Burton makeup, it's a relief to see him, more and more often these days, acting with nothing but his real face. In Bruce Robinson's The Rum Diary -- liberally adapted from Hunter S. Thompson's novel -- Depp plays a wayfaring, hard-drinking journalist, Paul Kemp, who has drifted to Puerto Rico, circa 1960, where he lands a job at a floundering, two-bit newspaper, The San Juan Star. Its editor, played by a cigar-chomping Richard Jenkins, hires him reluctantly; never mind that he was the only person who applied for the job.
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The Double shows its cards right away, when the screen fills with a cable news show on which a congressman insists "Russia's back!," noting that the country has reignited its nuclear program, its president is openly hostile toward the U.S. and it has more covert agents inside our borders than ever before. Russia's back, baby!
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Sometimes directors with certain strengths try to stretch different muscles and you desperately wish they wouldn't: Woody Allen getting all serious with Interiors comes to mind. But Roland Emmerich, taking a break from cavorting with woolly mammoths and blowing up the world, is onto something with Anonymous, an intricate -- if not terribly convincing -- historical thriller positing that a minor Elizabethan poet named Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and not William Shakespeare, wrote all those plays and sonnets that the world loves so well.
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Not even the most enormous movie marketing budget in the world could buy the perfect timing of Andrew Niccol's In Time, an allegory about the disparity between the rich and the poor in this country that's so confident it barely even bothers to masquerade as a thriller even though, supposedly, that's the way to sell tickets. So what if the characters occasionally spout Marxist pamphleteering dialogue like "The truth is, there's more than enough"? In Time has so much style and energy that it comes across as an act of boldness rather than just a liberal-minded tract, though of course, it's that too. If there were ever a movie made for the 99 percent, this is it.
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After the Shrek series used up its charm on rote third and fourth installments that nevertheless raked in giant piles of box office bullion, the prospect of a spin-off prequel focusing on Antonio Banderas' swashbuckling, footwear-sporting feline seemed as inevitable as it was unpromising. But Puss in Boots, directed by Chris Miller (who also helmed Shrek the Third) is a legitimately entertaining prequel that encapsulates what the franchise does best: Breezy action, clever twists on classic figures from fables and grown-up gags tucked in amidst the kid-friendly developments. ("You got any idea what they do to eggs in prison? I'll tell you this -- it ain't over easy!" the Zach Galifianakis-voiced Humpty Dumpty quavers at one point, in the first prison rape joke I can think of to not only be slipped into a kiddie flick but also highlighted in the trailer.)
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If Sherlock Holmes could be successfully steampunked into a rakish action hero, there's no reason The Three Musketeers couldn't be gearpunked into some tolerable 17th century equivalent -- and Athos, Porthos, Aramis and young D'Artagnan are actually soldiers, so no serious character tweaking is required to send them off into repeated swashbuckling setpieces. It's not the addition of airships and male dangly earrings that make Paul W.S. Anderson's take on Alexandre Dumas' classic, much-adapted adventure such a drag, it's everything else -- the incoherence, the anvil-heavy dialogue, the lack of anything beyond the broadest of characterizations.
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There's a danger in dismissing Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre as lightweight just because it takes the most generous attitude possible toward human nature. Being jaundiced about the world is easy -- it takes relatively little energy to expect the worst from everyone. But it's harder, as the dour Finnish filmmaker has shown us time and again, to allow for the possibility of surprise in the way people behave and treat one another, and the rewards are far greater. Kaurismäki's comedies are characteristically charcoal-toned -- never quite black -- but the unapologetically hopeful Le Havre is more silvery-gray. It's an open-hearted Eeyore of a movie.
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Margin Call isn't the first film to peer into the moneyed, aspirationally heartless world of finance, and it's not going to be the last, but it's got a fair shot at being the one with the most masterful timing. J.C. Chandor's feature debut aims to offers insight into the mindset of bankers poised to plunge the country into the 2008 economic crisis because of their own reckless conduct, and it reaches screens as Occupy Wall Street has spread across the U.S. and internationally, fueled in part by outrage about a lack of accountability in the financial and corporate world. The film's not an indictment or a satire -- it's a tense but contemplative exploration of being on the other side of one of those mirrored skyscraper windows, of being in a precarious place of privilege, power and, most important of all, carefully guarded remove.
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