TOP 12 FILMS OF 2012: Jacob Boon Coast writer since 2011 Jacob Boon will sometimes check his email in the theatre during a bad movie. He is not a very nice person. Ruby Sparks (Fox Searchlight) Directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris An introverted novelist’s dream girl magically springs to life from the […]
Molly Segal
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Hitchcock
This tepid biopic by Sacha Gervasi chronicles the pre-production and filming of Psycho, a movie that was controversial in its making (in an era when a cross-dressing serial killer wasn’t your standard protagonist). Anthony Hopkins dons a fat suit and puts on his best jowly pout, remaining a caricature of Alfred Hitchcock. It’s the Mrs.—Helen […]
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Deadfall
Deadfall is at heart a B-movie, disguised in the garb of a more A-list cast. It’s hard to summarize the mess of events that tries to pass as a plot: a pair of outlaw siblings from Alabama, Liza (Olivia Wilde) and Addison (Eric Bana), get in a bad car crash after a heist and split […]
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Cloudburst
It’s always refreshing to see an aging couple star in a movie, and even more so when the couple in question is a lesbian couple, Stella and Dot (Olympia Dukakis and Brenda Fricker)—the former liberates the latter from a nursing home so they can elope in Nova Scotia (it is directed by Thom Fitzgerald, after […]
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Anna Karenina
Joe Wright adds his name to the long list of directors who’ve adapted Leo Tolstoy’s classic Russian tome. This iteration, penned by playwright Tom Stoppard, has its shortcomings, including its length. Two and a half hours isn’t adequate time to develop characters complex enough to pull of the dramatic and dark plot of the socialite […]
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Talaash
Equal parts murder mystery, police procedural and melodrama, it’s hard to take Reema Kagti’s Talaash too seriously. As inspector Surjan Singh Sekhawat (Aamir Khan) investigates a suspicious and fatal accident with the help of a sex worker named Rosie (Kareena Kapoor), a series of supernatural events and forays into the city’s criminal underbelly ensue. Khan […]
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Life of Pi
Shipwrecked en route to Canada from India, Pi Patel (Suraj Sharma) finds himself in a lifeboat with a small menagerie of animals, including a Bengal tiger. As his older self (Irrfan Khan) recounts the story to a writer (Rafe Spall), we travel back in time to his childhood in India and disastrous voyage in which […]
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Lincoln
While a two-and-a-half-hour political movie could be painfully slow, director Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner recreate Abraham Lincoln’s final term as US president in a surprisingly engaging way. As Lincoln fights to pass the 14th Amendment, in order to give black Americans equality before the law, in a civil war-torn country, he encounters numerous […]
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Wreck-It Ralph
An existential crisis finds its home in a video arcade. After 30 years of playing the bad guy to Fix-It Felix (voiced by Jack McBrayer), the oversized Wreck-It Ralph (John C. Reilly) abandons ship and ventures to other games in the hopes of a better life. He stumbles into Sugar Rush, a candy land kart […]
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Midnight’s Children
It’s a lofty task to create a movie from a novel, and Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, even at two and a half hours, doesn’t feel complete, despite novelist Salman Rushdie penning the screenplay himself. Two boys born on at midnight on the eve of India’s independence are switched at birth: one poor, the other rich. […]
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The Man with the Iron Fists
The Man with the Iron Fists is a B-movie to its core—the lovechild of kung fu and grindhouse, with a smattering of Western flare. And it’s no wonder—directed and co-written by RZA (of The Wu-Tang Clan), produced by Eli Roth (Grindhouse), and presented by Quentin Tarantino himself, this movie reeks of violence, greed, sex and […]