Killer Elite is a jet-set action thriller about an ex-military operative named Danny (Jason Statham) who must rescue his mentor (Robert DeNiro) by uncovering the truth behind a series of assassinations commissioned by the British government. Not to be confused with the mostly terrible James Caan film by the same name, Killer Elite is a […]
Zuppa Theatre
Posted inArts + Music
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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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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Riveting drama on Another Earth
The lone special effect in this not-quite-sci-fi film from rookie director Mike Cahill is, as the title suggests, a second Earth, an orb that hangs in the sky inviting, admonishing and absorbing the projections of the characters below. It’s also a classic Macguffin, because *Another Earth* isn’t about life on a mirror-image planet but rather […]
Posted inArts + Music
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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One Day isn’t quite enough
What begins as an almost sexy encounter between Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) on grad night at Edinburgh University in 1988 turns into a saga of their friendship. We’re privy to the following 20 years of their respective lives, every July 15, as each finds or loses ambition—Sturgess, a coked-up TV host who […]
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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 […]
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Predictable Friends With Benefits
Just when you thought Hollywood was going to break some rules and get all polyamorous, it cranks out another predictable, if R-rated, romcom. Two hotties—an “emotionally damaged” recruiter, Jamie (Mila Kunis), and “emotionally unavailable” GQ recruit, Dylan (Justin Timberlake)—become best buds who just want a li’l hanky-panky on the side, sans relationship. Complications ensue (kinda) […]
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Captain America: The First Avenger worthy of the stars
It’s no small feat to make a movie about a patriotic weakling transformed into a chiselled slab of prime soldier meat—outfitted in a stars-and-stripes uniform, no less—without succumbing to jingoistic excess. Yet the makers of Captain America somehow do just that, softening the corny edges of the comic book story with several well-placed winks at […]
