Duncan Jones has skills; he's an architect of emotional dislocation. The filmmaker reenters that purview where he left it -- in 2009's Moon -- for his new thriller, Source Code. It works for a while: The sci-fi action film has as chilling an introduction as you'll see this year. Jones' talents even tie in with the film's premise: Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) finds himself in another man's body, and has to continually relive the same eight minutes before a bomb detonates on a Chicago-bound train until he can figure out how to stop it. It's horror on a loop -- laboring to sift through where and who you are while trying to piece together a mystery with a running clock.
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You've really pulled off a triumph, of sorts, when the most charismatic character in your movie is a discarded tire. But Rubber, a quasi-exploitation horror film directed by French DJ, record producer, filmmaker and raconteur Quentin Dupieux, stops just short of making that tire a star. This is no ordinary tire; it has telekinetic powers and a great deal of pent-up anger. But Dupieux's camera loves that tire only the littlest bit. He's more interested in all the things that make his movie uninteresting, chiefly its faux-intellectual, thimble-deep exploration of audience's expectations and willingness to be duped.
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Kids in the movies these days: When it's not their disappearance, illness, or untimely death tearing a family to pieces, it's the discovery that they've been dabbling in the dark arts or have succumbed to full-on demonic possession. Doesn't anyone just get left behind to defend the house from burglars anymore? Insidious, the new film from the wunderkind creators of the Saw franchise, borrows a move or two from both playbooks, and sets the whole thing in a creaky Tudor with an ominously cluttered attic.
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Now that the procession of Elizabeth Taylor tributes is finally over, the real fanaticism can begin! I'm staining my corneas with purple Crayola Washables, pounding shots of White Diamonds straight from the tube, and slurring, "Tell mama all" to my saliva-drenched Montgomery Clift poster. I'm also revisiting one of Elizabeth Taylor's most senselessly elegant movies, the 1963 "drama" The V.I.P.s. It's about attractive people who are horny at the airport. I've already taken off!
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Julian Schnabel's Miral is a fictional (though somewhat fact-based) story set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I had high hopes for the picture, since Schnabel's last feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was one of my favorite movies of the past decade. Miral is, paradoxically, both more modest and more ambitious than Diving Bell: Here, Schnabel doesn't have to face the challenge of getting inside the mind of a man who's almost completely sealed off from the world; on the other hand, he's treading into extremely sticky political territory here, and the story he's trying to tell -- in which the lives of four women intertwine, over a span of some 45 years -- is technically more complicated.
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The jubilant broadness of François Ozon's Potiche is both its biggest liability and its selling point: From frame to frame, the movie might alternately buoy you and wear you down -- I've seen the movie twice, and both times I've stumbled out thinking, "Now that wasn't so bad!" Seeing Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu together in the same movie is, at this point, hardly a terrible thing, and their finest scene together -- they get down, ever-so-gently, on the lit-up, blinking floor of a disco -- is one of the movie's more effervescent pleasures.
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Director Zack Snyder is out to create an action melodrama in Sucker Punch, bringing the voluptuous despair of Douglas Sirk to gun battles and samurai blade fights -- a high-ticket version of something we've seen in Asian cinema, from Chinese kung-fu movies to Quentin Tarantino's work to Korean revenge dramas. His martial pastiche of musical and steampunk is similar to earlier dishes of pop culture simmered down into an action reduction; Star Wars and The Matrix come to mind, among others. All that's missing is the excitement.
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Unlike the rap group Young Black Teenagers, which had no black members, the film White Irish Drinkers is not titled ironically; writer/director John Gray's Brooklyn-based, 1975-set film teems with characters who are in fact white, Irish and drinkers. And, as you might have guessed from its title, Drinkers is as full of cheap sentimentality and predictable behavior as a Hell's Kitchen bar would have been in the 1970s.
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Most adults would never see Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules of their own volition. But it's too bad more filmmakers won't see it, to save us from having to sit through the umpteenth badly conceived and paced indie drama-slash-comedy about family eccentricity, angst and resentment.
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Peek through the murky little window that is Peep World and you'll see lots of actors you know from TV: Michael C. Hall of Dexter, Rainn Wilson of The Office, Sarah Silverman of The Sarah Silverman Program, Lesley Ann Warren of In Plain Sight and Desperate Housewives. While it's nice to see TV actors get a crack at the bigger screen, Peep World barely seems like a movie. Withered and shrunken, it feels even too small for TV, especially when you consider that many of these actors have spent time on shows where the writing actually matters.
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Are you skeptical of Vanessa Hudgens's ability to play "street-smart" in Sucker Punch this weekend? You are? Settle down and breathe, because she already played "book-smart" and "Stanford-bound" in High School Musical 3: Senior Year. I anticipate your complaints: "Yes, Movieline, this is a bad movie," you caw (while secretly groping the "W" on your self-made Wildcats letter jacket), "but is it lovable?" I contend that it is! And not just because Zac Efron is the only person in history to look more like a Fisher Price Little Person as he ages. Let's dribble the basketball of intellect between our legs and figure it out.
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Warmly observed and solicitous of its audience to the point of caress, Win Win is as comfortable an experience at the movies as you might have this year. Writer and director Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor) specializes in light humanism (or humanism lite), storytelling that features recognizable people facing their recognizable lives with just a little more grace and good nature than is recognizable. The flourish there at the end lends McCarthy's understated, involving approach a bit of self-affirming flattery: These people look and sound just like me, therefore, I am as endearing and ultimately decent as these people.
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Matthew McConaughey should always play lawyers. There's something smirky, cocky and untrustworthy about his demeanor -- he slides through every movie like a greased weasel, but in The Lincoln Lawyer, it works. As Mick Haller, a Los Angeles lawyer who does business from the back of his Town Car, the superefficient McConaughey is something of a marvel. Modesty isn't his thing -- he's the hardest-working laid-back man in show-business -- but this time around, at least, his self-assurance by itself is magnetic. McConaughey bills by the minute, but at least he delivers.
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As part of my ongoing effort to give the Hollywood marketing machine the benefit of the doubt, I've long been waiting for the hotness of Bradley Cooper to kick in. After watching Limitless, I'm still waiting. Cooper's teeth are polymer-perfect, and I'm not so sure that's a plus. The father of our country reportedly had dentures made of wood or hippo ivory, which must have been ghastly, yet so many contemporary movie-star choppers appear to have been carved from a solid block of something. Is the George Washington look the gold standard among Hollywood dentists?
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Maybe it's a Canadian thing. Like his countryman, Kiefer Sutherland, Seth Rogen has a voice that's 10 years older than he is -- a combination of world-weariness and exuberance, an instrument that he's mastered for specific comic shadings. Sutherland wrings anger and shock from the premature gray in his, and by the time 24 ended, he'd physically caught up with the age emanating from his larynx. In the likable, misfits-on-the road comedy Paul, Rogen's soulful rustiness is used for the sound of the intergalactic traveler. With it, he lays a claim to being one of the premier vocal talents of his generation.
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