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Everyone Else (2010): A-
An opening image of an intricately embroidered carpet beautifully suggests the knotty drama to come in Everyone Else, Maren Ade’s superb depiction-cum-dissection of a young German couple’s fraying relationship. The twists and turns of romance are at the epicenter of Ade’s follow-up to 2003’s excellent The Forest for the Trees, with architect Chris (Lars Eidinger)…
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Big Trouble in Little China (1986): C+
John Carpenter eschews horror and sci-fi for jokey action-comedy in Big Trouble with Little China, which benefits from a rollicking wise-ass performance from Kurt Russell but otherwise falls limp courtesy of too many corny gags. Mashing up Eastern kung-fu and Western westerns, the film involves big rig driver Jack Burton (Russell, playing a tongue-in-cheek parody…
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New Moon (2009): D
Plot deficient to the point of formlessness, New Moon ups the Twilight franchise’s schmaltzy teen-lit melodrama without providing any sort of narrative backbone to sustain it. As with its predecessor, this sequel is built around the chaste romance between human teen Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and hunky vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a pair of…
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Clash of the Titans (2010): C-
Louis Leterrier’s Clash of the Titans may be a re-do of the beloved 1981 Ray Harryhausen fantasy saga, but in its thudding rock soundtrack, its grim, bloody vision of ancient Greece, and its horror-movie-monstrous mythological beasts, the template the film really follows is that of the Playstation’s God of War franchise. In said comparison, this…
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Dog Soldiers (2002): C
Strong creature design is the sole calling card of Dog Soldiers, in which Scottish military men engaged in a training mission in the deep dark woods square off against a pack of tactical werewolves. In his feature debut, writer/director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) falls back mainly on army squad clichés and rote conflicts, along…
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The Men Who Stare At Goats (2009): C-
A war satire woefully short on laughs, The Men Who Stare At Goats is about precisely nothing – other than stars desperately trying to energize humorless material – until its concluding moments, at which point it futilely attempts to make a statement about the need for innovative, non-violent dreamers in our current war-entrenched country. Directed…
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Whip It (2009): B-
Drenching itself in ‘70s and ‘80s stylings merely reinforces the fact that Whip It has been seen a hundred times before in slightly altered incarnations. Still, as a saga of rebellious youth achieving self-actualization, Drew Barrymore’s maiden behind-the-camera effort could be far worse, excessively prolonging its tale but injecting it with enough vivacious you-go-girl energy…
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Armored (2009): C+
Nimród Antal’s sleek direction is the only thing of interest in Armored, a rote B-movie in which a heist goes wrong courtesy of one robber’s nagging conscience. Having just lost both his parents, which left him with a house the bank wants to repossess and a delinquent kid brother social services wants to snatch, armored…
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Evil Dead II (1987): B+
Not a sequel so much as an elaborate do-over, Evil Dead II amps up the ghastly laughs to generally thrilling results. Though its characters aren’t, the film is distinctly aware of its predecessor, as evidenced by its blowing through an intro – in which Ash (Bruce Campbell) takes Annie (Sarah Berry) to a remote cabin,…
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Doomsday (2008): C+
Neil Marshall deliberately avoids reinventing the wheel with Doomsday, a post-apocalyptic thriller that bluntly melds 28 Days Later, The Road Warrior, Robin Hood and the Flesh Fair sequence from A.I. That, for a time, this hodgepodge works at all is a testament to his no-nonsense approach to the material, which is played fast, cheap and…
