The best argument for “Escape from Planet Earth,” the latest children’s animated film to roll off Hollywood’s assembly line, is that it’s a mostly painless experience for adults. That’s really all a parent can ask for if they want to take their young kids to the movies more than the two or three times a […]
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While the name Nicholas Sparks and the word “masterpiece” will never be uttered in the same breath, there are two films (“The Notebook” and “A Walk to Remember”) that prove that the schmaltzy romance novelist’s paperbacks can be adapted into modestly affecting melodramas for the screen with the right talent. Well, some of his paperbacks,
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The highest grossing Korean film of all time, Dong-hoon Choi’s “The Thieves” has been repeatedly characterized by critics as its native country’s take on Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11” remake. While there are certainly surface similarities between the films—both deal with a band of robbers pulling off a major heist—the comparison hardly seems fair in that
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Zombies are in. Slow zombies, fast zombies, historical zombies, futuristic zombies, Nazi zombies, stripper zombies — you name an adjective, there’s probably been a zombie version of it in film, television, and/or video games. As a result, it’s starting to seem like there isn’t anywhere new for artists to go with the cannibalistic, reanimated creatures,
Review: “Warm Bodies” Read More »
Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. It’s finally February, meaning there are now non-Oscar-bait releases worth getting excited about. Steven Soderbergh’s new thriller “Side Effects” is one such release. But that doesn’t mean the slate is filled with winners, as the
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“Bullet to the Head,” Walter Hill’s first film since 2002’s “Undisputed,” is a triumphant return for one of the medium’s preeminent action masters. With the exception of the “48 Hrs.” movies, Hill’s directorial efforts aren’t smash hits, but they are oft-excellent, exciting genre pictures about men tangling with morality and mortality through hyper-competent use of
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It certainly seems as though more effort went into conceiving the basic premise for “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters”—the eponymous fairytale characters grow up to professionally battle the species that nearly roasted them to death as children—than writing the screenplay itself. Not only does writer Tommy Wirkola (who also directs) employ a paper-thin plot, he
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. It’s Super Bowl weekend, meaning Sunday’s grosses should be relatively subdued as Americans stay home, fill up on pizza and nachos, and watch grown men pummel each other. But that doesn’t make the movie-money race
Box Office Beat: Weekend of February 1 Read More »
This year’s Oscar-nominated short films will be released in select cities next month, but a vastly inferior program of shorts will sell at least 10 times the number of tickets. “Movie 43,” as it’s titled for no apparent reason, follows the Hollywood moneymaking formula recently re-popularized by “Valentine’s Day” and “New Year’s Eve”: maximize star-power
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Hello and welcome back to Box Office Beat, the column in which I predict the upcoming weekend’s box office results. There are three January releases left, and not one of them appears to be worthy of audience attention. Two (“Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters” and “Parker”) didn’t screen for critics until tonight; one (“Movie 43”)
Box Office Beat: Weekend of January 25 Read More »
