Fans of Ryan Gosling who grew up watching him in Breaker High and The Notebook, be warned. In the eight years since starring in the Nicholas Sparks blockbuster, he has become a man with increasing levels of badass-ness. This is evident in Drive, a hyper-violent and visually stunning picture that has Gosling playing the role […]
Empire Theatres – Dartmouth Crossing
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I Don’t Know How She Does It is dull and unfunny
Sarah Jessica Parker’s new movie, I Don’t Know How She Does It, is a comedy that fails to deliver any laughs. Parker plays Kate Reddy, a mother of two who works during the day as a financial analyst. As a project emerges involving the creation of a new retirement savings plan, Parker must decide between […]
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Relentless Attack the Block
One of the most imaginative and energetic spins on the alien invasion genre in years comes from first-time feature director Joe Cornish and a gaggle of mostly unknown young actors. A group of slang-slinging boys in the London ‘hood, led by the charismatic Moses (John Boyega), square off against a posse of blind, gorilla-like aliens […]
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Bucky Larson: Born To Be a Star is blindingly awful
While jerking off with a few friends to a vintage skin flick that turns out to star his parents, a buck-toothed, poorly-endowed hick with Anton Chigurh hair (Nick Swardson) is inspired to go to Los Angeles and get into the porn business. I am hardly patting myself on the back when I say that the […]
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Warrior cuts emotional chord, cheese
Warrior feels like a glorified commercial for Tapout. But like all good commercials, Warrior strikes an emotional chord, even if elements verge on a Bloodsport level of cheesiness. Two estranged brothers (Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy) are brought back into the world of mixed martial arts when a multi-million dollars championship (surprisingly, hosted by Tapout) is […]
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Contagion both creepy and remote
Steven Soderbergh’s thriller about a killer virus that spreads death, terror and chaos around the world is chilling in more ways than one. It elicits a spinal shiver, to be sure, to contemplate the fragility of both human bodies and societal structures, and Soderbergh’s economical, frill-free approach to the story makes the escalating panic feel […]
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The Debt pays off
John Madden’s remake of a 2007 Israeli film Ha-Hov about three Mossad agents who botch the kidnapping of a German war criminal is a case study in thriller construction. We meet the agents (Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds) in the late-90s, 30 years after their high-risk mission to lift a vicious doctor (Jesper […]
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Not much bite to Shark Night 3D
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 […]
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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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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 […]