Released at the tail end of the summer, Shark Night 3D tries to capture the popularity of last year’s aquatic-horror comedy Piranha 3D, but fails due to cheap special effects and a lack of humour. The plot is simple enough: A group of university students go to an island cottage on a Louisiana lake, but […]
Empire 17 Cinemas Bayers Lake
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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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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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Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark lighter than it should be
Horror fans, beware: Troy Nixley’s re-invention of the 1973 TV movie won’t have you burrowing your face in the shoulder the person next to you. Little Sally (Bailee Madison), is sent to live with her dad (Guy Pearce) and his girlfriend (Katie Holmes), architectural conservationists, in their current project, a spooky mansion in Rhode Island. […]
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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 […]
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Cliche-ridden Columbiana
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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One Day isn’t quite enough
What begins as an almost sexy encounter between Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) on grad night at Edinburgh University in 1988 turns into a saga of their friendship. We’re privy to the following 20 years of their respective lives, every July 15, as each finds or loses ambition—Sturgess, a coked-up TV host who […]
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Conan The Barbarian bloody, hysterical
With a few modifications to the original 1982 Arnold Schwarzenegger epic—Conan (Jason Momoa) is now blood-thirsty from his birth on the battlefield—Marcus Nispel’s reincarnation welcomes gore, actualizing all horrific means of butchery. Conan’s quest for revenge begins as a child when megalomaniac Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), seeking a missing bit of a magical mask, slaughters […]
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30 Minutes or Less kind of meh
Pizza delivery boy Jesse Eisenberg gets conned into a convoluted get-rich-quick scheme; the brainchild of Danny McBride and Nick Swardson to finance their tanning salon/prostitute ring. Trapped in a bomb-vest with a 10-hour expiration choice, Eisenberg’s character has to rob a hundred grand from a bank to pay off a hit man or explode. As […]
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Glee: The 3D Concert Movie calculated karaoke
Don’t be fooled, Kevin Tancharoen’s Glee: The 3D Concert Movie isn’t so much a movie or a documentary as it is an endorsement for the hit TV series. Testimonials of doting fans getting teary-eyed over how the show transformed their lives are intercut with live concert footage of the TV stars covering pop songs. The […]