Shamelessly entertaining when it's not just silly, Colombiana begins with a young girl trading one shady underworld for another. The first is that of Bogotá in 1992, where a deal between two heavies is going so well it can only mean someone's about to die. That someone is the father of Cataleya (Amandla Stenberg), a schoolgirl who absorbs her father's goodbye -- a speech of family loyalty and legacy so archetypal Al Pacino mutters fragments of it in his sleep -- with unblinking shock. "In this world," an enemy henchman (Jordi Mollà) tells her as her parents lay dead, "Smart girls always get what they want." With that Cataleya's trance is broken, and a stabbing followed by a spectacular foot chase announces her transformation into a pint-sized badass.
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Graham Greene's 1938 masterpiece Brighton Rock is an enduring curio of fiction: A literary pulp novel ahead of its time, a gangland allegory of sin and the cost of redemption, and perhaps most fascinating, a pre-WWII oracle anticipating the traumatic British century to come. It's a prism through which all the harrowing perils of class strife, organized crime and romantic love bend and refract into Greene's glowing white weave of language, which, when projected onto a screen, have yielded both an equally classic 1947 screen adaptation and now Rowan Joffe's troubled updating.
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Jesse Peretz's Our Idiot Brother is a feel-good movie for people who resist feel-good movies, a flawed vessel that nonetheless stays afloat by clinging to its buoyant star, Paul Rudd. Its problems are numerous and apparent: The picture meanders listlessly, and in the end it's really more of a character sketch than a comedy -- the movie's writers, David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz (the director's sister), haven't really bothered much with a plot. Yet I came out of Our Idiot Brother feeling better than I did when I went in. It's the kind of movie whose value lies between the lines, not directly on them, and if the pleasures it offers are slender ones, at least there's something good-hearted about them.
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There are two types of middle-aged people in the world: Those who didn't see John Newland's 1973 made-for-TV movie Don't Be Afraid of the Dark when it aired, and those who did see it and were marked for life.
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Did you feel it? A few minutes after the earthquake that ran up the east coast Tuesday, the courtyard of my Brooklyn building rang with voices: This one jumped off of her shaking bed; that one, sadly, didn't feel a thing. It seemed more likely, as my equilibrium gave way, that my body was the source of the betrayal, not my surroundings. But then I'd never experienced an earthquake; I have always managed to sleep or daydream through them, retaining a sliver of doubt as comfort for being left out. If I didn't feel it, how real could it be?
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The idea that Machete, Robert Rodriguez's grindhouse tribute, was inspired in part by his Spy Kids trilogy of the early aughts is an appealing one. Danny Trejo played a kid's idea of a bad guy named Machete in the films, then helped carry a genre mutation of the character over into bloody B-movie territory. So it seems fitting that Rodriguez was inspired in turn, on the set of Machete, to reanimate his Spy Kids franchise. It might even bode well. But the germ of the idea -- Machete star and new mom Jessica Alba wrestling with an exploding diaper in full costume -- is little transformed in Spy Kids: All the Time in the World, despite two added dimensions and a brand new cast.
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Great romances don't always happen overnight. But we need to wait nearly 20 years for the romance in Lone Scherfig's One Day to get cooking, and for long stretches it seems as if we're watching this particular pair of nonstarters hem and haw in real time. Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess play Em and Dexter, who meet not-so-cute one night in 1988, just after they've both graduated from some unnamed English university. She's gawky and wears glasses; he's upper-crusty, as we can tell from his forelock. After a mild drunken flirtation, the two toddle back to her flat with the intent of having casual sex. The first thing Em does upon entering her cramped digs it put on a Tracy Chapman record. Back in the day, we used to call that a wienie shrinker, and Dex would be inclined to agree.
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Movies have become so technically sophisticated, so hyper-real, that there's almost no such thing as a cheap pulp entertainment anymore: So many movies set out to wow us, which isn't the same as giving us pleasure. Yet even within those dispiriting parameters, you couldn't come up with a more mediocre wow than Marcus Nispel's Conan the Barbarian, which is perhaps less a remake of John Milius' 1982 crowdpleaser than an attempt to honor the spirit of Robert E. Howard's original novels, though it's hard to tell exactly what effect Nispel is going for. I wanted to giggle when Ron Perlman, as Conan's dad-to-be, performed an emergency mid-battle C-section on his dying wife. But the Conan birth scene, so epic in its epicness, is played totally straight. When Perlman holds that tastefully blood-streaked CGI newborn aloft to the mighty heavens, he seems to be angling for a few gifts of frankincense or myrrh, or at least a gift certificate from Land of Nod.
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The first American voice that is heard in Amigo, John Sayles's ponderous cine-play set during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 19th century, rips through the air with the brutal dissonance of an artillery shell. The torqued South Carolina accent of actor Brian Lee Franklin -- cursing out the country's "little monkeys" -- announces the arrival of an American squadron in the tiny Philippine "baryo" where they and Amigo remain for the next two hours. Along with an introductory crack about "hearts and minds" made by squad Lieutenant Compton (Garret Dillahunt), that private's twanging epithet puts the audience on Code Orange allegory alert.
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If you come in cold, as I did, to the remake of the 1985 vampire movie Fright Night, your hopes for what begins as an ordinary slasher (bloody prologue followed by cleansing, suburban daylight) improve with every new face on the screen. First there is Anton Yelchin, the Russian-born young actor last seen in The Beaver. Yelchin's tuning fork physique and apparitional beauty are an inspired choice for a horror hero; he projects a vulnerability that made Alpha Dog -- a junky 2006 fratricide thriller -- almost unbearable to watch. Then in comes Toni Collette as Yelchin's sturdy single mom, Imogen Poots as his girlfriend, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as his former best friend. The alpha creep who moves in next door? That would be Colin Farrell and his magnificent, church-steeple eyebrows. Looks like somebody's not messing around.
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In his 1998 article about the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 into the Florida Everglades, William Langwiesche explains the concept of the "normal accident." When 105 people die, the public wants answers -- a story to make sense of what happened and determine who is to blame. The piece's ultimate point is that allowances must be made, particularly in a world with as many working parts as ours, for disasters that are not only unforeseen but unavoidable. Laying out the complicated sequence of events that led to an oxygen tank explosion in the plane's cargo hold, Langwiesche arrives at the conclusion that it may be more dangerous to take extreme measures to avoid what amounts to a series of benign human oversights combined with circumstance than to accept that the universe will occasionally and very casually line up against you. It's a beautifully wrought and supremely rational argument whose logic might be a source of comfort if it weren't so horrifying.
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Jesse Eisenberg's performance in 30 Minutes or Less is like a mirror of something you've seen before in a movie you've seen before: As an unambiguously unambitious pizza-delivery guy who's forced to rob a bank, is he riffling through the deck and pulling out the same old cards, perhaps in a slightly different order? Or is he adding subtle variations to a type of character he's played many times previously, biding his time until he can get another role like the perfectly calibrated one he played in The Social Network?
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One of the running gags in Fox's effervescent hit high school series Glee is that no matter how things occasionally come up roses for the show choir freaks and geeks of McKinley High, there's always someone, slushie in hand, waiting to take the Gleeks down a peg or two back to cold, brutal reality. Ironically, it's that same multicolored frozen treat, globbed at the screen in slow-motion over the end credits of Glee: The 3D Concert Movie, that underscores a similar, sad burst of recognition that's perhaps been long coming: For all the uplifting, inclusive good that Glee inspires in its young target demographic, it's a property that's become high on its own self-projected, self-congratulatory fantasy of "fuck the haters" do-goodingness. And there's nothing more that Glee needs or deserves right now than a slushie to the face.
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Everything about The Help, which details the everyday lives and struggles of black domestic workers in early-1960s Mississippi, is just a little too polished: The cinematography is creamy and radiant, the costumes piggyback heavily on Mad Men-style nostalgia, the white villainesses and heroines are, respectively, too cartoonishly cruel and too selflessly noble. Yet The Help -- which was adapted from Kathryn Stockett's best-selling novel -- is compelling in spite of, not because of, its glossy trappings. It's a popular entertainment that finds its historical footing in the faces of its actors: The Help may not tell us much about the real horrors of the civil rights era, but it does tell us something about the way people lived -- and the way they handled their often conflicting loyalties and resentments -- while those horrors were playing out. In that sense, it's a radical movie masquerading as a tame, inoffensive one.
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I could describe Rise of the Planet of the Apes as Escape from Alcatraz, except with apes, but that would make it sound like a movie you might actually want to see. I could also describe it as an "origin story" that supposedly explains, albeit in a rather indirect fashion, how apes became evolved enough to wear black leather-trimmed tunics and walk around speaking in cultured voices that sound suspiciously like those of Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall. But even if that's the movie director Rupert Wyatt thinks he's making -- and the one James Franco thinks he's starring in -- that's not the movie I saw.
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