Mark McQueen’s zombie flick may be a shameless 28 Days Later knock-off, but it does give the genre an absurdly fascinating tweak. In his movie, the people infected by a performance-enhancing drug gone wrong aren’t merely fast-moving flesh-eaters. They’re also nimble practitioners of parkour. Yep. Craig Fairbrass, Danny Dyer and MyAnna Burling lead the Londoners […]
Matt Semansky
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Battle:Los Angeles wins
An alien army arrives on Earth to annihilate humanity and it’s up to a few good Marines to save the world. Sound familiar? Yep, Battle: Los Angeles is a long way from original, but it’s in the same area code as enjoyable due to its relentless action and occasional feints in the direction of allegory. […]
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West is West goes south
It’s been 12 years since writer Ayub Khan-Din unleashed East Is East, a comedy about a working-class family headed up by an abusive, controlling Pakistani patriarch (Om Puri) and a tart-tongued white Briton (Linda Bassett) in the early 70s. Puri’s George Khan was so loathsome that the movie, for all its virtues, left a bad […]
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Paul packs laughs
Actors, writing partners and real-life buddies Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have a rare chemistry capable of making material seem better than it is. In Paul, the British buds star as sci-fi-loving dweebs who help deliver a friendly extraterrestrial (the voice of Seth Rogen) from imprisonment on Earth. In support is a team of perfectly […]
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The Adjustment Bureau needs a few tweaks
I can’t attest to how well Philip K. Dick’s source story about fedora-clad operatives who enforce the plan of a higher power plays on the page. I can say that the screen adaptation is too murky about just how much power these “adjusters” have and how they can be so clumsy about it to be […]
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Cedar Rapids floats on
Cedar Rapids is both more and less than the lowbrow exercise suggested by its marketing poster, from which uber-nerd Ed Helms beams the promise of acting as both a punchline and punching bag. Helms does serve these functions, but his character – an innocent Midwestern insurance rep named Tim who gets a painful education in […]
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Big, bad Red Riding Hood
A werewolf stalks a snowy mountain village in Catherine Hardwicke’s fairy tale adaptation, but its victim count doesn’t compare to that of the film itself. None of the people involved in making this movie are spared embarrassment. Not Amanda Seyfried as Valerie, whose connection to the wolf further complicates a love triangle that includes her […]
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Patricia Rozema’s truth barometer
Patricia Rozema has never felt that her gender held her back in her own career, so her participation in this weekend’s Women Making Waves conference for female filmmakers isn’t particularly motivated by politics. That doesn’t mean, however, that the Canadian director doesn’t appreciate the importance of the event hosted by the Atlantic chapter of Women […]
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Beastly ain’t pretty
Writer-director Daniel Barnz goes less than skin-deep with his Beauty and the Beast update starring Vanessa Hudgens and Alex Pettyfer. The latter is Kyle, a vain high school student who becomes a hermit after a witch (Mary Kate Olsen, looking somehow less corpse-like than usual in pasty goth makeup) whacks him with her magical ugly […]
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Rango stalls
Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp venture into the world of animation, a journey that yields inconsistent results. Depp voices the title character, a domesticated chameleon left stranded in the Mojave desert. Searching out sustenance and companionship, he ends up in the Wild West town of Dirt, where he backs […]
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Drive Angry‘s a hell of a movie
Patrick Lussier’s splatterfest is fully aware of its own glorious idiocy, yet it works mostly because its star, Nicolas Cage, attacks his absurd role without so much as a single knowing wink. Cage is deadpan as a dead man who’s escaped from hell to track down the cult that murdered his daughter and is about […]
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Ugliness looks beautiful in Biutiful
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu foregoes the multiple-plotline approach he employed in previous films like Babel and 21 Grams, but that doesn’t mean Biutiful is any less complex. There’s still plenty of plot, and although it’s essentially a character study, the character—a dying street hustler (Javier Bardem) and father of two who can communicate with the dead—is […]