A melodramatic plot, an overdone soundtrack and countless montages make Francis Lawrence’s (I Am Legend) adaptation of Sara Gruen’s Depression-era novel (screenplay by Richard LaGravenese) a two-hour slog. Water for Elephants is told as a flashback in which a geriatric Jacob (Hal Holbrook) recounts his life story: young Jacob’s (Robert Pattinson) parents die the day […]
Empire 17 Cinemas Bayers Lake
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Disney neuters African Cats
Live, powerful carnivores filmed in their natural environment should be a can’t-miss premise, yet Disney somehow manages to fumble African Cats. The stars of the show are two families, one headed up by a single cheetah mom and the other a pride of lions under threat from a rival gang. Samuel L. Jackson’s overwritten narration […]
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Bloody, funny Scream 4
Rule number one: there are no rules in the latest Scream installment. A Facebook-savvy murderer reenacts the serial stabbings of the first Ghostface Killer when Sydney Prescott (Neve Campbell) returns to Woodsboro as a bestselling author. Updating the cultural allusions, director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson round up the original Scream team in this nostalgic comedy/horror movie. It’s right at home with the trilogy, despite the lapse of a decade—horror movie references and disemboweled bodies to boot. And where it lacks the low-budget kitsch of the original, it lives up to the humour of its predecessors. But the “self-aware post-modern meta shit,” to quote the movie, finally becomes overbearing—the joke runs thin when explained too many times. –Molly Segal
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Win Win indie gold
The director of The Station Agent and The Visitor, Thomas McCarthy, strikes indie gold again with this warm comedy-drama about a struggling lawyer who brings a runaway teen into his family and onto his high school wrestling team. Attorney and grappling coach Mike (Paul Giamatti) sees an opportunity to pocket some extra cash when he […]
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Rio grates, sags
As befits an animated film set in Rio De Janeiro during Carnavale, Rio is a throbbing combination of rhythm and colour. The samba beats and tie-dyed palette comes in the service of a story about a nerdy blue macaw (Jesse Eisenberg) who’s yanked from domesticated life in Minnesota and brought to Brazil to mate with […]
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Hanna delivers thrills, teeth
Hanna is a lot of things. Its surface is suggested in the trailer: Saoirse Ronan is the titular teen, raised since diapers to be a polyglot killer by her father, Erik (Eric Bana), hiding in snowbound wastes from CIA nasty and dental hygiene obsessive Marissa (Cate Blanchett) until she’s old enough to face up to […]
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Arthur a worthy diversion
Though it originally belonged to an actor who was a decade older and a foot smaller, the role of Arthur Bach is a custom fit for Russell Brand. The comedian steps into the late Dudley Moore’s shoes as a drunken, irresponsible heir to a family fortune who’s leveraged into a loveless marriage just as genuine […]
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Your Highness “tepid and lazy”
There was reason to believe that director David Gordon Green and writer-actor Danny McBride, who collaborated to varying degrees on Pineapple Express and Eastbound and Down, could make some comedic hay with this quest-movie parody. Instead, they’ve produced a tepid and lazy film, wasting their own talents and those of a strong cast. McBride plays […]
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Born to Be Wild short, too sweet
Cuteness jumps off the screen in David Lickley’s 40-minute 3D documentary, Born to Be Wild, narrated by Morgan Freeman. Two women are dedicated to raising orphaned animals in large communities—Daphne Sheldrick rescues baby elephants in Kenya; Biruté Galdikas rescues baby orangutans in Indonesia. Elephant poaching and the destruction of rainforests, the reasons these animals are […]
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Hop falls flat
Hop, directed by Tim Hill (Alvin And the Chipmunks), is about a friendship between the digitally animated Easter Bunny-in-waiting, EB (Russell Brand), and the unemployed and whiny Fred O’Hare (James Marsden). When EB runs away to Hollywood to become a drummer, a trio of ninja bunnies is dispatched to retrieve him while an overgrown evil […]
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Blood-chilling Insidious
Saw director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell ditch the blood spilling and go for blood-chilling with *Insidious*, the most thoroughly terrifying film since its influential ancestor Paranormal Activity. After an accident in his new home, little Dalton (Ty Simpkins) goes into a mysterious coma, a development that coincides with much supernatural weirdness. His parents […]
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Source Code executes
Duncan Jones follows up his Kubrick-cool debut Moon with an earthbound piece of sci-fi, one starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier continually re-living the eight minutes leading up to a train bombing. While trying to figure out the identity of the bomber, Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens also tries to figure out how his superiors (Vera Farmiga […]