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Underworld: Awakening

Kate Beckinsale returns to the Underworld film series for the fourth installment, which finds fierce vampire Selene (Beckinsale) escaping captivity and taking up arms against humans after mankind discovers the existence of vampires and lycans, and launches a massive war aimed at wiping out the creatures of the night. Stephen Rea and Michael Ealy co-star.

Saturday, 16 March 2013

Snitch

If you're looking to see Snitch because you can't get enough of Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson's blend of electric charisma and unbridled machismo, you're destined to be sorely disappointed. Helmed by stuntman turned director Ric Roman Waugh, this is decidedly more father-son drama than action film, wasting Johnson's best assets and demanding he bring his acting ability to a new level. It just sets him up to fail. Based on a true story, Snitch centers on John Matthews (Johnson), a successful business owner with a big house, loving family, bitter ex-wife...

Dark Skies

There are times when I think that the horror genre is a club that?s slowly trying to exclude me because I?m not afraid of children. In the past six months I have reviewed three underwhelming horror movies that used creepy children to spook audiences, but with each one I was left pleading for studios to find another trope to run into the ground. Instead I get Dark Skies, or as I like to call it, ?Number Four.? Unlike The Posession, Sinister and Mama, at the very least writer/director Scott Stewart?s new film trades demons and spirits for aliens,...

Escape From Planet Earth

It?s one thing for a movie to have weaknesses. Even the better films released every year have some flaws, or at least a few areas that could use improvement. The problem with Escape From Planet Earth is that it doesn?t have one single strength to counteract any of those weaknesses. Every single facet of the film is at best, slightly below average and at worst, downright terrible. The characters are poorly conceived stereotypes that lack depth. The animation is not bad but still below recent standards set by DreamWorks and Pixar. The jokes are...

Side Effects

Side Effects is set in New York City, but it barely looks like it. Steven Soderbergh, acting as always as his own cinematographer, makes the city look colder and more modern than ever, putting his characters in front of anonymous glass buildings and generic streets, robbing the city of its character and warmth at every turn. It's a brutally effective choice for what he claims is his final theatrical release, a twisty and surprisingly sexy thriller that, despite its heat, is actually about how cold and disconnected the world can be. The film, written...

Identity Thief

Shitting in a sink is a tough act to follow. Melissa McCarthy may have logged hours on Gilmore Girls and Mike & Molly, but her star broached the stratosphere the moment she soiled a posh, cream-white dressing room in Paul Feig?s irreverent Bridesmaids. That scene-stealing performance earned McCarthy two chances this year to convince audiences she?s capable of carrying oneleg of a harmless buddy comedy (the next being Feig's The Heat). So far, though, the gifted comedian?s only being asked to recycle the obnoxious, uncouth and inappropriate...

Friday, 15 March 2013

Safe Haven

Nicholas Sparks has become such a massive force in American romantic films that it only takes a few signifiers to recognize his work. A beach setting, with marshes in the background glinting with sunlight. A couple, almost always white, either in casual resort wear or bathing suits, embracing. There's always something dark looming, be it a secret from the past or a tragedy the characters don't see coming, but the glowing smiles of the lovers overcome it-- these are movies painstakingly engineered to bring its fragile audience just to the brink...

The Master

In his last and possibly best film, There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson dove headlong into a character who is a very specific, very important American archetype. Daniel Plainview, who was almost an instant icon, was the American Dream embodied and curdled, a salesman and sociopath who shaped the wilderness of the country in his own image. In his new film The Master, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a uniquely American character not unlike Daniel Plainview, a man who chooses to shape people rather than nature. But the film's focus is divided...

Beautiful Creatures

Your Twilight alarm may be screaming at first glimpse of Beautiful Creatures, a supernatural romance between two teenagers-- one human, one immortal-- who long to be together, and express that longing in a lot of gorgeous natural locations while scored to modern pop music. And while the world of Beautiful Creatures is no less absurd than Twilight, filled with witches called "casters" and curses from the Civil War and an all-knowing Viola Davis, it possesses a crucial self-awareness to actually allow you to get in on the fun. It's not always easy...

Oz The Great And Powerful

In a world of sequels, reboots, remakes, re-adaptations and re-imaginings, prequels have become one of Hollywood?s hardest nuts to crack. There have been far fewer successes than notorious missteps, from George Lucas? second Star Wars trilogy to X-Men Origins: Wolverine. In directing Oz The Great and Powerful, Sam Raimi was facing an uphill battle working to live up to the legacy of Victor Fleming?s classic The Wizard of Oz, but by embracing what was great about the old film while introducing plenty of new to the world, he has succeeded. The legacy...

Stoker

The best way to watch Stoker, the new film from director Park Chan-wook, is as if you have the senses of its lead character. India Stoker, played by the brilliant Mia Wasikowska, has a special gift where she can hear and see things imperceptible to the rest of us, seeing the world for all of its smallest details and elements. Watching the movie, audiences should completely absorb themselves in it, pushing back reality to focus on every line, every cut, every pan and every sound. It?s the only way to properly view something this magnificent. Mixing...

 
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