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 […]
Empire Studio 7 Lower Sackville
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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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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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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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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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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 […]
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Disappointing The Help
In early-’60s Mississippi, aspiring journalist Skeeter (Emma Stone) decides to write a book based on the experiences of the black maids in her hometown of Jackson, women who keep house and raise white children for minimum wage but aren’t allowed to use their employers’ bathrooms. Great idea! Someone should really make a movie about that. […]
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Final Destination 5 is what you think it is
Another spectacular disaster, another batch of blandly beautiful survivors, another series of bloody accidents orchestrated by Death to reclaim its escaped prey. Only the specifics change in this film series, which kicks off its fifth edition with a bridge collapse that kills all but a handful of ill-fated office workers. Much like the Saw films, […]
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The Change-Up a cringeworthy bro-mance
Ryan Reynolds (a promiscuous stoner douchebag-with-a-heart-of-gold) and his BFF since grade school, a much older-looking Jason Bateman (a family man with an insatiable appetite for success) star in David Dobkin’s (Wedding Crashers) latest bro-mantic comedy. The premise is as simple as it is stupid: the dudes get drunk, piss in a fountain and voila, switch […]
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Rise of the Planet of the Apes entertains
Your complete appreciation of the entertaining new Planet of the Apes prequel could hinge on your comfort with CGI in close-up. I was never sold on the motion-capture rendering of actor Andy Serkis as the primary primate, Caesar. Roddy McDowell in a rubber mask from 43 years ago—or even Tim Roth in Tim Burton’s Ape […]
