Rodrigo Cortés' Buried is a Twilight Zone episode for Mother Jones subscribers. Ryan Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a U.S. contractor -- a truck driver working in Iraq -- who, at the beginning of the movie, at the end, and for every minute in between, is trapped in a plain wooden coffin with nothing but a cellphone, a lighter, a glow stick and a few other accoutrements. His convoy was attacked by a group of Iraqis; he was knocked out, awakening to find himself buried alive in this little pine box. Because time is of the essence and his air supply is running out, he frantically starts dialing numbers on his little cellphone lifeline -- 911, the State Department, his wife -- desperate to reach someone who can help.
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It's not every day that a director makes a movie that's both amazing and pointless, the kind of gimmicky shockeroo provocation that wows you even as it leaves you going, "Huh?" Gaspar Noé fills that niche, for better or worse, with his hallucinatory life-after-death tone poem Enter the Void, a picture that's by turns inventive, tender and boring, and one that uses a variety of novelty point-of-view techniques: If Penisvision isn't your thing, then Vagin-o-rama just might float your boat.
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Filmmakers feel an understandable urge to rise to the occasion when committing the lives of '60s saints and mold-busting mavericks like Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg to the screen. Dylan got Todd Haynes's 2007 deconstruction of the biopic, I'm Not There (in which David Cross appears as Ginsburg in an indelible cameo). And now Ginsberg is the subject of Howl, a collagist treatment of his creation myth. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman began their account of the conception of Ginsburg's titular declamatory opus and the 1957 obscenity trial that followed its publication as a straight documentary. After roughing out the usual talking heads and archival footage, it became clear to the directors of The Times of Harvey Milk (Epstein only) and The Celluloid Closet that the best way to honor their subject was to get a little funky.
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There's something uncanny about Edward Norton conversing with his twinned self on screen. He's an actor whose self-assurance often bleeds into self-regard, as if he were performing for himself while co-stars just happen to be in attendance. As identical brothers Bill and Brady Kincaid in Tim Blake Nelson's atonal American gothic Leaves of Grass, he relays both halves of a dialogue -- old school, invisible split-screen style -- and for once it's an equal fight. He can suck the air out of the room without anyone else getting hurt.
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In a recent interview, Woody Allen was asked to explain (or was it defend?) his prodigious output: roughly one movie written and directed a year since 1969. Part of the frustration with Allen, now in the thick of his 70s with no signs of slowing (maybe he could explain his vitamin regimen next time), is the number of filler or half-formed films that he makes, the ones that never ferment into anything memorable, ending up as disappointing interstitials between films like Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. "I have a lot of ideas," Allen said. "Some of them are good, some of them are less good, and I just make them."
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If the devil is in the details, Devil could use fewer of them. Writer-producer M. Night Shyamalan's planned series of spooky, seemingly family-friendly "Night Chronicles" begins with the world's very first claustrophobic-whodonit-recovering alcoholic-boogie man-slasher-Christian morality tale. Devil packs a lot of business into 80 brisk minutes but is shockingly short on fun or fright. What should be a simple, fool-proof setup for a chiller of confinement -- five strangers get stuck on a broken elevator and mysteriously start dropping dead -- gets overwhelmed by enough incident and absurdity to make a Goosebumps fan roll her eyes.
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As cool and straight an entertainment shot as his brother's recent directing debut was pyrotechnically scattered, Ben Affleck's The Town has got bangs, bucks and the kind of showy, signature roles aspiring actors pantomime themselves asleep to at night. The movie is as slick and tightly constructed as Affleck's debut, Gone Baby Gone, was prolix and unruly. But The Town lacks Gone's operatic ambitions. And the irony is that that lack of a grand or even grandiose plan keeps this very good film from being a truly great one.
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Jack Goes Boating, Philip Seymour Hoffman's first time out directing a feature film, is such a gentle picture that at times it threatens to drift off the screen. Hoffman plays Jack, a going-nowhere, reggae-loving New York limo driver who appears never to have had a girlfriend. His closest friends, married couple Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega), decide to set him up with one of Lucy's new co-workers, Connie (Amy Ryan) -- she works phone sales for a slick funeral director-bereavement guru, though she's so awkward and tentative in this new gig that she's in danger of losing it.
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After a recent New York screening of the new mockumentary The Virginity Hit, cowriter/director Huck Botko (who with his partner, Andrew Gurland, also cowrote the August mockumentary The Last Exorcism; they have a type, apparently) told the audience that he had never seen Superbad. No kidding -- where Greg Mottola's paean to the awkwardness of losing virginity felt authentic and grounded, The Virginity Hit feels forced, hollow and ultimately scattershot. Never has watching an on-screen teen trying to lose "it" seemed so empty.
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Judged on a curve, set by the testosterone-fueled raunch-a-thons that have dominated teen comedies from American Pie to Superbad and beyond, Easy A deserves an A+, with extra credit for lack of misogyny, cock talk, or flatulence. But curves or concessions aren't necessary. Not when the film exhibits this much wit and intelligence, and not with Emma Stone casually owning the screen and turning this buoyant lark into a star-making vehicle of Pretty Woman proportions.
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For those viewers who haven't read Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, and aren't expecting an elegantly understated, devastating allegory of the human condition, Never Let Me Go might work on its own terms, as a love story with a sci-fi twist. But, like last year's The Road, another loving adaptation of a contemporary classic, Never Let Me Go teases out the novel's central drama but neglects the mysteries at its margins -- the gathering clouds that actually produce the storm.
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Sorry to disappoint the fanboys, but this is the first film in the Resident Evil series in which Milla Jovovich neither begins nor ends the movie stark naked. That said, her skintight ass-kicking ninja outfit doesn't exactly leave much to the imagination, and her most sensual features -- her feline eyes and liquid mouth -- are as available and expressive as ever. For the fourth consecutive film in the franchise, she's a whirling, swirling, zombie-killing baby doll, and remains the only reason to visit Paul W.S. Anderson's dopily grim dystopia. It's a fact that Anderson tacitly acknowledges in the film's opening scene, populating the screen with dozens of careening Jovovich clones.
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There is one moment of true terror in I'm Still Here, Casey Affleck's dickish, realish account of his brother-in-law Joaquin Phoenix's "lost year," and it does not involve the whoring, coke-hoovering, excrement-eating or other Jackassery otherwise on copious display.
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There's a moment very early in The Romantics when something deeply, inadvertently unsettling transpires. Katie Holmes, as Laura, sits alone in a room rehearsing her toast for that night's wedding rehearsal dinner. She looks up in thought, stammers out a few platitudes, then looks down, talking to herself, exasperated and vaguely put-upon. "Dear God," you think, "she's channeling Tom Cruise."
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American romantic comedies have become so dismal over the past 20 years that it wouldn't be hard for even the Romanian film industry to show us up. I'm still waiting for the great Romanian romantic comedy (and hey, it could be out there), but for now, France saves the day with Heartbreaker, in which French-cinema heartthrob Romain Duris plays cupid in reverse: Friends and family members of women in lousy relationships hire him and his two-person team to incite a breakup. Duris's character, a just-scruffy-enough smoothie named Alex, moves in on these women, flattering them, charming them, and otherwise boosting their confidence to help launch them out of these unhappy unions and get them on the road to better ones.
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