FEATURE FILMS Higher Ground – Friday, September 16, Park Lane 7, 7:05pm Naturalism and a radiant intelligence have been the distinguishing features of Vera Farmiga’s acting performances, and it’s a quality she brings to her directorial debut. Farmiga takes command in front of and behind the camera, playing a religious convert whose creeping doubt in […]
Matt Semansky
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Mike Clattenburg interview
Mike Clattenburg is not the kind of guy who seems likely to forget his roots. And that’s important, because the director of one of Canada’s most beloved comic creations, Trailer Park Boys, is primed for a career ascendance. For the first time, one of his films, the war drama-comedy Afghan Luke, will be screened at […]
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Sarah’s Key digs into Nazi history
Sarah’s Key presents Kristin Scott-Thomas as an American journalist whose research on a story about a mass arrest of Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris leads takes an unexpected detour into her husband’s family history. Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner toggles between her story and flashbacks depicting a young girl taken in the Vel d’Hiv Roundup who manages to […]
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Straw Dogs‘ thrills hit above average
Rod Lurie’s remake of the 1971 Sam Peckinpah thriller makes up for the opacity of its meaning with the assured execution of its tension-and-release formula. James Marsden and Kate Bosworth star as David and Amy, an effete LA screenwriter and his actor wife, who move out to her tiny Mississippi hometown. David’s threatened by the […]
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Relentless Attack the Block
One of the most imaginative and energetic spins on the alien invasion genre in years comes from first-time feature director Joe Cornish and a gaggle of mostly unknown young actors. A group of slang-slinging boys in the London ‘hood, led by the charismatic Moses (John Boyega), square off against a posse of blind, gorilla-like aliens […]
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Bucky Larson: Born To Be a Star is blindingly awful
While jerking off with a few friends to a vintage skin flick that turns out to star his parents, a buck-toothed, poorly-endowed hick with Anton Chigurh hair (Nick Swardson) is inspired to go to Los Angeles and get into the porn business. I am hardly patting myself on the back when I say that the […]
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Contagion both creepy and remote
Steven Soderbergh’s thriller about a killer virus that spreads death, terror and chaos around the world is chilling in more ways than one. It elicits a spinal shiver, to be sure, to contemplate the fragility of both human bodies and societal structures, and Soderbergh’s economical, frill-free approach to the story makes the escalating panic feel […]
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The Debt pays off
John Madden’s remake of a 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov about three Mossad agents who botch the kidnapping of a German war criminal is a case study in thriller construction. We meet the agents (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds) in the late-90s, 30 years after their high-risk mission to lift a vicious doctor (Jesper […]
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Apollo 18 dull faux-doc
The faux-documentary horror film has become its own subgenre, and familiarity with this particular storytelling conceit is starting to breed fatigue, if not contempt. Apollo 18 brings the Blairanormal Clovertivity into space, using footage supposedly taken from NASA’s archives and depicting a secret 1974 lunar voyage gone wrong. Three astronauts (Lloyd Owen, Ryan Robbins and […]
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Everyone’s a critic
The summer movie season is over, and though critics hated The Smurfs and Transformers, they were big hits. In response, Team Coast sounds off on movies they love that (almost) no one else does. Ishtar It’s telling that four of the five movies on this list are comedies; what’s funny is the most subjective thing. […]
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Our Idiot Brother is easygoing
This Paul Rudd vehicle is like a movie soufflé, light and sweet and easy to dig into despite its lack of nutritious substance. Rudd plays Ned, a shaggy stoner whose good heart and unfiltered honesty lands him first in jail as the movie begins. Once free again, these same qualities upset the personal and professional […]
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Riveting drama on Another Earth
The lone special effect in this not-quite-sci-fi film from rookie director Mike Cahill is, as the title suggests, a second Earth, an orb that hangs in the sky inviting, admonishing and absorbing the projections of the characters below. It’s also a classic Macguffin, because *Another Earth* isn’t about life on a mirror-image planet but rather […]