Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 picks up not where its predecessor (Mesrine: Killer Instinct, which opened last week) left off, but rather where that film's first scene left off: with the imminent demise of its title subject. In the opening scene we return to the Paris intersection where Jacques Mesrine (Vincent Cassel) was murdered in his car, and find the press feeding unchecked on his perforated corpse. It's a mirroring that doesn't bode well for those hoping that director Jean-François Richet might make the second half of his saga from scratch.
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I stand before you the apparent target market for Going the Distance, the latest 'x' in the "con" column of Drew Barrymore's exasperating career ledger. After a recent expedition into critically acclaimed territory that produced her directing debut Whip It and a first Golden Globe for her performance as Little Edie Bouvier in Gray Gardens, she has returned to the populous, brain-bashing shoals of romantic comedy. Similar to He's Just Not That Into You, which was based on a bestselling dating guide that seemed to capture the imagination of budding Cathy's everywhere, Going the Distance hopes to skate by on its thin blade of cultural cachet. Having declared fantasy passé, certain rom-com scientists are exploring the lure not of engaging escapism but tame, tranquilizing relatability. It's a concept so edgy my spellchecker is rejecting it. But it's a word, spellchecker. It's also now a selling edge for the same old crappy motion picture.
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Within the first five minutes of Robert Rodriguez's Machete, his cheeky, freewheeling return to exploitation homage, there's a car crash, a mutilation, a decapitation, a baker's dozen deaths by blade, a naked lady, and a Steven Seagal sighting. And that's not even mentioning the clamshell cell tucked up the naked lady's hoo-ha. Then the film ramps right up to a pseudo-vintage, sprocket-skipping title sequence that promises the most deliciously random cast in recent memory: Jessica Alba AND Lindsay Lohan, Seagal AND Robert De Niro, a Nash Bridges reunion AND a Danny Trejo leading-man coronation. Though the film can't reasonably maintain this 10-gags-a-minute trajectory, it sure does try. Forget modulation, nuance or storytelling, this is a movie that hits hard from first to last, no questions asked or logic followed.
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An unlikely, unwieldy transplant of the Coen brothers classic Blood Simple to an indeterminate, dynastic domain of China, Zhang Yimou's A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop follows its master with the tumbling, untroubled constancy of a puppy. There is novelty in Zhang's fidelity to the blackly circumstantial clockwork of the Coens' neo-noir plotting, set here in the phantasmagoric realm of a wuxia opera. There also emerges a nagging glibness that regularly gets the best of some inspired filmmaking. In its most tiresome moments, Noodle Shop overestimates the wit of its formal exertions, and feels less like a film than an exercise that will leave fans of the original comparatively cold.
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Anton Corbijn's The American looks and feels like a movie made by a filmmaker who hasn't been to the movies since the '70s -- and I mean that as the highest compliment. This is Corbijn's second feature: His first was the elegiac and gorgeously shot (by Martin Ruhe) Control, based on the life story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the influential and much-loved Manchester band Joy Division, who committed suicide at age 23 in 1980. Before Corbijn was a filmmaker, or even a director of videos for the likes of U2 and Depeche Mode, he was a photographer specializing in rock 'n' roll types as subjects; he had photographed Curtis and the other members of Joy Division early in his career, having left his native Holland for England because, as he's said in interviews, he wanted "to be where that music comes from."
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Don't be fooled: despite the fact that producer Eli Roth has stacked his name above the title on posters and advertisements, The Last Exorcism has absolutely nothing in common with Roth's adolescent torture-porn Hostel franchise. And despite a titular invocation of the original The Exorcist (with an implied promise to put a tourniquet on any more sequels), Daniel Stamm's film bears little resemblance to William Friedkin's moody, head-spinning freak-out. Instead it's something more curious, and quite welcome: a deft, intelligent, pseudo-documentary thriller disguised as a horror movie. Until it concedes to standard slash-and-rush tactics in the final act, The Last Exorcism manages to be scary without resorting to cheap special effects or gore. It's not as good as it could have been, but it's so much better than expected.
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If you're like me, and you find yourself retreating to a safe place in your mind whenever human beings are being graphically decapitated on screen, you'll spend the majority of Centurion, horror maestro (The Descent) Neil Marshall's Roman bloodbath, on psychological lockdown. The more philosophical and intellectually detached among you might wait out the frequent plasmatic explosions from an interested distance, speculating on the cultural circularities implicit in evisceration as entertainment, or teasing out the film's bizarre but unmistakable urination motif. The rest -- the majority, I suppose -- will revel in every hyper-realistic goring, unconcerned with the irony of the bloodthirsty, second-century barbarism Marshall dwells on, giving the film its of-the-moment appeal.
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Takers is a sterling example of how a movie can take a basic, appealing idea -- bank robbers who plan their infrequent crimes so meticulously they never get caught, living the high-life in between jobs -- and turn it into something that you could easily watch while brushing your teeth, clipping your toenails, plucking your eyebrows. The movie at least attempts to offer some textbook pleasures: Director John Luessenhop gives us several elaborate shoot-outs, a killer explosion here and there, even a glitzy-classy shopping montage (and you thought those were only for girly movies like Sex and the City). But Takers is so indistinguished that it starts fading from memory as soon as the end credits start rolling. It comes to the party overdressed and still fails to make an impression.
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Middling, middle-class entertainment aimed at the midpoint between comedy and drama, mass appeal and sophistication, Change of Plans is eager to please and easy to dismiss. Riffing on a familiar premise, director Daniele Thompson (Avenue Montaigne, Jet Lag), working from a script she wrote with her son Christopher Thompson, puts 10 Parisian professionals together for a dinner party and lets the sparks, secrets and passions fly. Spouses bicker, kisses are stolen and home design is silently judged.
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Luridly handsome and resolutely unsympathetic, as played by Vincent Cassel, the title character in the gangster's greatest hits compilation Mesrine: Killer Instinct is a thug's thug. It would seem he was so in life as well: A notorious criminal in his native France, Jacques Mesrine died with his leather jacket on (as seen in an ambush depicted in the movie's opening scene) after a life of unrepentantly violent, sometimes brashly vigilantic misdeeds.
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"Only death is obligatory," Noe (Efraín Solis) says in The Milk of Sorrow, "the rest is because we want to." After earning a rare measure of trust from Fausta (Magaly Solier), a traumatized young Peruvian villager who has just lost her mother, Noe becomes exasperated with the extreme fear that circumscribes her life. A gardener at the Lima estate where Fausta takes a job as a maid, he bridges the film's metaphorical distance between the godless, pragmatic privilege of the city and the deterministic mythologizing of the rural poor, literally: He is the only outsider she will allow to escort her home in the evenings, she being too terrified to walk alone.
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There's a degree of gruff integrity at work for at least two-thirds of Alexandre Aja's grindhouse piranhapalooza Piranha 3D, in which a megaschool of man-eating fish thought to be extinct burst through an underwater fissure to terrorize a normally placid lake in Arizona. During spring break, no less. You know what that means: Lots of naked and semi-naked nymphs writhing around, exposing much comely flesh to be nibbled upon. Ah, the pleasures of unapologetic, good-natured exploitation! Until the movie takes too sharp a speedboat turn into excessive and somewhat unpleasant goriness, Aja gets the tone just right: Piranha 3D takes place in a fictional locale known as Lake Victoria, but it may as well be called Lake Titty-cockoff.
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The narrator of Israeli director Yael Hersonski's A Film Unfinished describes the "layers of meaning" locked within the images recorded by Nazi soldiers of the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942. They are part of a compilation of raw footage that until 12 years ago were assumed to be vérité glimpses of the half-million Jews trapped within the confines of the Ghetto. It was only when a new reel of outtakes -- shots of the subjects rehearsing their "spontaneous" moments over and over -- was discovered that something closer to the truth about their provenance was revealed. Hersonski's measured, devastating pursuit of that truth adds another layer of meaning to those reels, even as it methodically spools and studies each one.
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Despite the movie's ad campaign, The Switch isn't Jennifer Aniston's movie, and even she seems to know it. This picture belongs to Jason Bateman, who, after years of playing the second or third banana (and plenty of times being the best thing in a given film), finally gets to show off his considerable gifts as the co-lead in a mainstream comedy. To watch him in The Switch, standing at the stove making pancakes (a lice-proof plastic shower cap pulled over his hair -- don't ask), or bringing the grace of a Gene Kelly routine to a bit in which, hung over, he barfs into an office waste-can, is to see a particular kind of comic intuition at work. For Bateman, there's no distinction to be made between high and low comedy -- he brings neurotic elegance to everything he does.
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Erik White wanted the housing projects in Lottery Ticket, his fractious wish-fulfillment comedy, to look like an "Everywhere, USA" that would be relatable to all. Though he envisioned the story taking place in his hometown of New York City, circumstance led him to shoot in Atlanta, Georgia, largely on a complex of soon-to-be demolished projects with a pink-bricked, benignly institutional look. He carefully shot around any identifying signs or landmarks, ensuring that his generic, non-specific, ultimately unsatisfying take on a bullet-proof concept -- an 18-year-old Foot Locker employee wins the lottery but is forced to wait out a long weekend within the cutthroat ecosystem of his community before he can claim the prize -- is reflected in its hermetic, alienating aesthetic.
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