Zoe Saldana stars as a revenge-minded assassin in Olivier Megaton’s action thriller, which takes a simple, A-grade premise and makes a hash of it with B-level execution. After a tense opening sequence in which a young, resourceful Colombian girl watches her parents get killed by a rival crime boss, we catch up with her in […]
Matt Semansky
Posted inArts + Music
Fright Night a bloody delight
Craig Gillespie’s Fright Night is that rarest of Hollywood beasts: a remake that brings fresh life and energy to an old idea. It helps that the original 1985 film has a lower profile than many of the horror flicks from that era. It also helps that Gillespie (Lars and the Real Girl) understands character and […]
Posted inArts + Music
Spy Kids: All The Time In The World exuberant
Whether he’s indulging his inner adolescent gore-hound in grindhouse fare like Machete or his inner pre-teen nerd in children’s flicks, Robert Rodriguez’s childlike exuberance bursts through every frame of his films. That joyousness pervades the latest entry in the director’s Spy Kids series, which has lain dormant for eight years but re-emerges here with a […]
Posted inArts + Music
Klutzy the Klown documentary
When an inebriated bar patron first told him about a Cape Breton clown who’d won the lottery, the story brought a clear image into Michael Fraiman’s mind. “I pictured that he lived in this mansion and wore a tuxedo with clown makeup,” Fraiman says, recalling the day Dale Rancourt—AKA Klutzy the Klown—first entered his imagination. […]
Posted inArts + Music
Disappointing The Help
In early-’60s Mississippi, aspiring journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) decides to write a book based on the experiences of the black maids in her hometown of Jackson, women who keep house and raise white children for minimum wage but aren’t allowed to use their employers’ bathrooms. Great idea! Someone should really make a movie about that. […]
Posted inArts + Music
Final Destination 5 is what you think it is
Another spectacular disaster, another batch of blandly beautiful survivors, another series of bloody accidents orchestrated by Death to reclaim its escaped prey. Only the specifics change in this film series, which kicks off its fifth edition with a bridge collapse that kills all but a handful of ill-fated office workers. Much like the Saw films, […]
Posted inNews + Opinion
Postcard art ridicules Dartmouth
Correction below. Iain Soder swears it was just a joke, that the postcards he designed for a NSCAD course—postcards that set an “I (Heart) Dartmouth” symbol against images of blasted-out craters and smoke-spewing oil refineries—were inspired by the good-natured barbs he and a Dartmouth-based friend have traded over the years. But Soder’s postcards sparked some […]
Posted inArts + Music
Captain America: The First Avenger worthy of the stars
It’s no small feat to make a movie about a patriotic weakling transformed into a chiselled slab of prime soldier meat—outfitted in a stars-and-stripes uniform, no less—without succumbing to jingoistic excess. Yet the makers of Captain America somehow do just that, softening the corny edges of the comic book story with several well-placed winks at […]
Posted inArts + Music
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 “an appropriately grand finale”
Director David Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves very nearly meet the impossible demands of wrapping up the past decade’s most successful film series, resolving character and story arcs while serving up the requisite action. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) continue to search out and destroy the pieces of Voldemort’s (Ralph […]
Posted inArts + Music
Horrible Bosses not bad at all
The creators of this comedy are so enamoured of their premise that they almost forget to convert their slick concept into actual entertainment. A sluggish half-hour is dedicated to the setup, as financial guy Nick (Jason Bateman), chemical company middle manager Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) and dental assistant Dale (Charlie Day) decide to murder the work […]
Posted inArts + Music
Transformers 3 fails to excite
Mega-budget schlock director Michael Bay re-imagines the space race and historic moon landing not as products of a Cold War pissing contest, but rather a military mission to investigate the crash landing of an alien ship. That’s the lone decent idea in this otherwise formulaic and tedious sequel, which once again finds the good-guy extraterrestrial […]
Posted inArts + Music
Monte Carlo not worth the gamble
This female buddy flick with elements of chaste rom-com and coming-of-age conventions teeters to the edge of decent escapist entertainment but doesn’t quite make it over. Teen queen Selena Gomez stars as Grace, a recent high school grad from Texas who’s been saving the money from her waitressing job for a trip to Paris with […]