Although he converted to marry his devoutly Catholic wife in 1926, Graham Greene was famously called to the faith during his time in Mexico, where he exiled himself in 1938, after an over-stimulated review of a Shirley Temple movie threatened him with extradition to the United States on libel charges. It was in Mexico that Greene conceived the first novel in his “Catholic trilogy,” The Power and the Glory, about a priest on the run during the Cristero War.
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Teenage Ansiedad (Cierra Ramirez) is lacking in role models. Her father’s unknown, her best friend (Raini Rodriguez) is faithful but a little dull, and her mother Grace (Eva Mendes) is a hotcha-cha mess who dates married dudes and behaves less like a mom than a deadbeat roommate. So when her English teacher (Patricia Arquette, vital in a too-brief role) introduces the concept of the coming-of-age narrative, hyper-precocious Ansiedad decides to use it as a kind of emancipation blueprint.
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As mild, comforting and vaguely colonial as beans on toast, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel brings together some of Britain's top-shelf acting treasures for a story of late-life awakenings and self-discovery in India. Directed by John Madden (of Shakespeare in Love and, more recently, The Debt), the film is, underneath its surface of warm fuzzies, a precision instrument aimed directly at the heart of its intended, underserved older audience.
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Casting Kathleen Turner as a small-town mom nominated for “Catholic Woman of the Year” is about as risky as it gets in The Perfect Family, first-time director Anne Renton’s soft-willed religious tolerance parable. The whiskied voice alone makes it sound like Tallulah Bankhead has risen from the dead and crashed the sacristy where Monsignor Murphy (Richard Chamberlain) is laying out his vestments for Sunday Mass. But as the anodyne network drama title suggests, petty ironies are more this movie’s speed.
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Chimpanzees are the putative subject of Chimpanzee, another in a line of Disney documentaries with big, blunt titles (Oceans, Earth, Nature) and very specific stories to tell. This time out, narrator Tim Allen tells us, our tale promises “drama, sadness, and joy in a world you and I may never set eyes on.” That world is the Ivory Coast rainforest, and we’re pretty much looking at it just then, but it becomes clear early on in the beauteous but outrageously martial Chimpanzee that things might not be what they seem.
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It’s spring rummage week at the movies, with four releases – Lockout, The Three Stooges, Cabin in the Woods and Craig Moss’s vigilante goof Bad Ass – retooling old gems and selling off genres for parts. Maybe next year we can look forward to a film made up solely of references to this quartet – The Three Bad Asses Escape Lockout in the Woods? Wait, don’t Google that. I don’t want to know.
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Man vs. beast, man vs. man, man vs. corporation, man vs. himself — The Hunter takes all these pretty ladies out for a spin, but can’t seem to decide which one to bring home. The set-up is so swift it could easily pass you by: Martin (Willem Dafoe) is contracted by a shady outfit to bag a Tasmanian tiger, presumed extinct, in the Australian wilderness. Rumor has it there’s one left out there, and what better reason to fully extinguish a species than in the name of pharmaceutical patent? Martin appears to have no particular feeling about this assignment; as long as his toiletries are properly lined up and he’s left alone, he doesn’t appear to have a particular feeling about much of anything.
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The 10 years that we are told at the beginning of Wrath of the Titans have passed since Perseus (Sam Worthington) defeated the Kraken may not seem like long enough, especially when you consider that it’s only been two since the Clash of the Titans remake was released, Kraken-like, on an unsuspecting populace. It was sufficient time, anyway, for Worthington to grow out his hair, so that in Wrath of the Titans he sports a soft cap of curls to go with his peaceful life among the humans. He’s lost a wife but gained a son and another pretext to propel a franchise whose fate was sealed once Avatar’s numbers started rolling in. That it was going to happen was certain; how it happened was of secondary concern.
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A movie about childhood nightmares that plays too much like an actual, incoherent nightmare to make a good movie, Intruders is a psychodrama divided against itself. Little kids don’t need a reason to get worked up about what’s in their closet, or to be told to worry. When it comes to being scared their imaginations are half cocked at all times, more than prepared to fill every blank with the bogeyman. Although Intruders, much like last year’s Insidious, is framed as a sins-of-the-father spook-fest, it assumes too little of its audience — specifically that we too need only contemplate a darkened wardrobe or the outline of a giant, grabby dude to want to jump out of our skin.
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If Stephen Dorff’s career never soared as high as he might have liked, the fact that it’s getting more interesting all the time must be some consolation. For someone who might not be considered a big movie star, Dorff has the distinct movie-star habit of seeming to play himself, even when he’s playing a big movie star. In Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and now in Brake, he appears to be the same flannel- and faded jeans-clad heartbreaker from the Aerosmith years. Dorff had the persona in place from the start; it’s the pictures that got small.
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For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting. Its comic arsenal is laid bare by the end of the credits sequence: There is Will Ferrell playing a Mexican ranchero and speaking Spanish; Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal as narco peacocks; telenovela melodrama played absurdly straight; self-conscious B-budget goofing; and plenty of guns and flames for ambiance. Are you not entertained?
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Although it’s set in the present, the characters in Lasse Hallström’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen seem to have been imported from a different time. The good ones behave in a courtly manner and speak in dignified tones and the rascals twinkle and flounce. Often the effect of Simon Beaufoy’s script (adapted from Paul Torday’s 2007 novel) is refreshing, due in no small part to the congenital irresistibility of the actors speaking his lines -- Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt and Kristin Scott Thomas. It’s when the adorably priggish Cary Grant type is accused of having Asperger’s by his plucky but labile future love interest and the benevolent Sheik bankrolling the duo’s wacky experiment is nearly assassinated by Yemeni jihadists that things get to feel a little pear-shaped.
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I’m pretty sure I ruined the night of a pair teenage boys huddled in the back row of a recent screening of Project X, a party disaster movie targeted at kids who find the Hangover franchise too sophisticated. All I did was sit down beside them, but I may as well have poked my head up into their treehouse. Girls ruin everything, especially the unmitigated enjoyment of a new Todd Phillips movie. A few seconds after the lights went down, as a shrill junior impresario named Costa (Oliver Cooper) was shouting 2 Live Crew lyrics about wanting pussy, the one beside me began twisting in an agony I came to enjoy much more than the movie we were watching.
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Gaga waxes poetic on pearls and baseball in the March issue of V Magazine: "I lay down on the airplane back from Japan, tossing around some dashi, fondling my pearls. I watched the movie Moneyball for the first time. I began to laugh and smile as [Brad] Pitt talked romantically about the game. I suddenly imagined that my pearls were teeny-tiny baseballs. When a player hits a home run, the baseball is flung into an abyss of enigma and screams so great. It travels so far that only rarely is one caught in the bleachers. Where do these balls go? Where do all these wins get encased? Are they in a heavenly baseball land floating around for players who pass to acknowledge? Or do they disappear?" [V Magazine via Deadspin]
Well, it finally happened. The line separating America from America: The Movie found a way to arrange itself into a stick figure and walk off the scene in disgust. In Act of Valor, an elaborate branding exercise for the U.S. Navy SEALs in the form of a Hollywood action blowout, the two mingle freely and openly at last.
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