There's a lot of "auto" in Dax Shepard's debut as an auteur. Shepard (who previously co-directed the mockumentary Brother's Justice) wrote, co-directed and stars in the action comedy Hit and Run; he even cast real-life love Kristen Bell to play the role of his cherished girlfriend, but their romance is not at the center of this movie — rather, it’s the deep love between Shepard and the many cars that populate the film that drives Hit and Run. It’s only when these machines rev their engines that the soundtrack fills with sultry ballads and the camera switches to slow mo — all the better for us to admire the sleek undercarriages and sexy lines of the movie’s many four-wheeled stars.
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To even describe The Expendables 2 as a movie seems to do both the medium and this strange, smirking effort a disservice. It isn't a movie — it's more like the world's most expensive, elaborate viral video, making a detour to the big screen before being broken up into more easily consumable segments to be consumed on YouTube.
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Easier to admire than to love, David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis is an amplified, feverish vision of the one percent as scarcely human — not because of any innate maliciousness, but because they're so removed from the lives of the masses. They're like children who've already won a video game and now play carelessly, without any need to observe the rules. more »
The Bourne Legacy is a passable movie that has the peculiar misfortune of being part of a very successful, influential and distinctive franchise. Box office-wise, this is probably not going to be much of a hardship, but in terms of content and style it definitely suffers in comparison. The Bourne predecessors, particularly the two directed by Paul Greengrass, are by my count some of the most exhilarating action movies in recent cinematic history.
The Bourne Legacy is not. more »
Hope Springs is not what it says on the package. The trailer is all comedy and quirk, but the movie is not.
Let’s face it though, the premise is a hard sell. Films about old people are anathema to mainstream Hollywood. Since the success of Cocoon — which featured its over-50 cast rejuvenated by a swimming pool containing alien pods — movies featuring actors of a certain age are rare, and despite the success of Space Cowboys, The Straight Story and Meryl Streep's last Oscar-winning vehicle, The Iron Lady, it is almost impossible to get a film made unless someone under 20 is pivotal to the script. more »
The Campaign, the new comedy starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, faces the challenge that troubles all political satires these days, which is coming up with material that can rival what's actually happening in the news. And that's not a point made in some hacky stand-up comedian way — "Those crazy folks in D.C., am I right?" No, it has become a legitimate, daunting task to come up with anything that can surpass, for instance, the wild reality show that was the recent Republican primaries.
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Films like Celeste and Jesse Forever and The Five-Year Engagement feel like the start of some new subgenre — these unromantic semi-comedies about the microdramas of nice, emotionally inarticulate people struggling their way through relationships. Both feature comedic actors working with material that's not intended to be all that funny, and both take angles on relationships that don't usually make it to screen — a prolonged breakup leading up to a divorce and a prolonged, unhappy stretch leading up to a wedding. And both cruise on the charms of their lead actors, in this case Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg, holding together just enough to be satisfying while also leaving you wishing they had a little more to them.
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Yes, there is a triple-breasted hooker in Len Wiseman's Total Recall remake.
If you happened to have missed the news posts and Comic-Con appearances (it was a lot of publicity for a three-line role), please rest assured that a futuristic working girl does indeed flaunt her unusually augmented bosom for Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), just as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger original. It's one of the few callbacks to the hallucinatory nature of Paul Verhoeven's wild-eyed, schlocky, terribly fun 1990 blockbuster, few other qualities of which this redo shares. The two films have the same underlying bone structure, sure, but this new Total Recall is made of more serious, more humorless stuff. It looks simultaneously lavish and interchangeable in its explosions and shoot-em-ups with a dozen other recent action movies, and in its sci-fi stylings with a dozen others in the genre.
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Searching For Sugar Man, which tells the improbable story of how a singer-songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez rose, fell, and found superstardom in what amounts to a parallel universe, is an elegy in several keys. One is clear and familiar: Upon his excited discovery by a noted producer, the music business circa 1969 ate Rodriguez for breakfast, and a talent still acknowledged by his peers went to waste. The second is more personal, and although Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul leaves a distinct and ultimately frustrating berth around the man at the center of his documentary, it becomes poignantly clear that an abbreviated resume and a family to feed didn’t keep Rodriguez from living an artist’s life.
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Walking out of The Watch, Saturday Night Live writer Akiva Schaffer’s garrulous but indistinctive sophomore directing effort, a young woman in front of me complained to her friend. “What do you even say about that?” he’d asked. “I have no idea,” she said. She only had to write up a list of the movie’s pros and cons, and even then she could think of but one item for the former column.
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Slick and mean and full of piss and chicken grease, Killer Joe has worse manners than its deadly, courtly antihero. But in its own way and to its own detriment, William Friedkin’s splattery, southern gothic return to the screen seeks to amuse as well as shake and stir. What begins as a set of open provocations and genre tweaks propping up the story of a trashily blended Texas family’s encounter with an alpha hitman takes a turn through Coen and Lynch Lanes before winding up at the corner of Friedkin and Peckinpah. There a trailer ignites with violence and the tone of alternately abject and mordant depravity begins flailing like a rogue firehose.
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The title character of Ruby Sparks is a 26-year-old painter from Dayton, Ohio played by Zoe Kazan, who also wrote the film's screenplay, She has bangs and wears brightly colored tights. Her first crushes were on John Lennon and Humphrey Bogart. She loves to cook, can't drive and doesn't own a computer. Her problems, as someone points out, are all of the "endearing" variety.
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Although the proliferation of talent shows on TV is proof of just how much audiences have come back around to watching dance on screen, Step Up Revolution suggests Hollywood is still conflicted about how to film it.
On one hand, the fourth movie in the Step Up franchise was shot in eye-popping 3-D. In choreographed numbers that grow crazier and more extravagant as the film proceeds, breakdancers kick their legs out toward the camera and hold gravity-defying poses; tracking shots glide across the pavement between cars as kids stride out in time to music; performers on bungee cords leap down a ramp toward us only to snap back. As spectacle, it is resoundingly cool.
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Like so many of the R-rated comedies of Judd Apatow and Todd Phillips, the Danish film Klown is about men behaving amusingly badly while the women in their lives wait on the sidelines for them to grow up and get their act together. In Klown, however, the ladies have a pretty good case for just walking away, and a certain resignation in their attitudes suggests they know it, but have already put so much time into these relationships that they feel terminally invested.
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The Batman brand is in the toilet at the outset of The Dark Knight Rises, the third and most self-consciously ornate pillar of Christopher Nolan’s caped crusader resurrection trilogy. The four years since The Dark Knight have passed as eight within the city state of Gotham — one of the neater doublings in a movie inlaid with prismatic tiling — and even the mayor condemns Batman as “a murderous thug.”
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