A narrator offers these wise words: “High school, it happens to everyone.” Fortunately, Joe Nussbaum’s Prom doesn’t have to happen to everyone. When the Starry Night Prom set accidentally gets burned to a crisp, the school principal assigns badass Jesse Richter (Thomas McDonell) to help the ambitious Nova Prescott (Aimee Teegarden) rebuild it in three […]
Empire 8 Park Lane
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Elephant the best thing in Water for Elephants
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 […]
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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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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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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 […]
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Hobo With A Shotgun hits its target
For most movies, adjectives like cheesy, offensive and tasteless carry a negative connotation. But this movie is called Hobo with a Shotgun, for fuck’s sake, so it’d be a shame if these descriptions didn’t apply. No worries there. Dartmouth director Jason Eisener’s first feature is a blood-soaked and kinetic exploitation masterpiece, an abattoir for cinema’s […]
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No knockout for Sucker Punch
Ass-kicking women are the main attraction in Zack Snyder’s latest addition to his repertoire—he directed 300 and Watchmen —of comic book fantasy flicks. Babydoll (Emily Browning) is orphaned at age 20. Instead of escaping from her abusive stepfather’s care, she’s sent to the loony bin. Only she can free her fellow patients, all beautiful women, […]
