I don’t know how true Jennie Snyder’s screenplay is to Emily Griffin’s novel because I never finished reading it. In the movie, smarty-pants lawyer Rachel (Ginnifer Goodwin) and bossy party girl Darcy (Kate Hudson) are BFFs. After Rachel’s birthday party, she hooks up with her boring but supposedly hunky lawyer friend Dex (Colin Egglesfield) who […]
Empire Theatres – Dartmouth Crossing
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Hoodwinked Too unhappily ever after
The sequel to Hoodwinked is a fairytale mishmash, spy-noir-western with too many characters to make it a compelling story. At “Sister Hood” training camp, Red (Hayden Panettiere) and the Sisters discover their chocolate truffle recipe (that makes its eater unstoppable) is missing. The Happily Ever After Agency dispatches Red and a “not so Big Bad […]
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Fast Five dumb, fun
The fifth installment of the cars-go-vroom series takes the action to Rio de Janeiro, where the gang led by Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Jordana Brewster try to pull off One Last Job. That job involves making off with a crime kingpin’s millions while evading his militia and a U.S. agent (Dwayne Johnson) determined to […]
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You don’t have to go to Prom
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 […]
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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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Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family a drag
The new addition to Tyler Perry’s Madea films disproves the theory that drag is inherently funny. Perry plays the title role of the potty-mouthed, fried chicken-obsessed matriarch of a dysfunctional family. When Shirley (Loretta Devine) finds out she’s dying, she tries to reunite her children with Madea’s help —the rest is a hodgepodge of uninspired […]
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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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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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Heavy-handed Soul Surfer
Footage that runs during the credits show the real-life Bethany Hamilton as a devout Christian, so it’s probably not fair to hold this movie’s bible-camp undercurrent against it. But I’ll do it anyway. As Hamilton, a competitive surfer who loses her arm to a shark but gets back up on the waves thanks to her […]