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The Hurt Locker (2008): A-
Kathryn Bigelow makes rock ‘n roll action films – heart-racing, pulse-pounding genre flicks that, when necessary, employ outsized melodrama to enhance balls-to-the-wall mayhem. The Hurt Locker is no different, save for the fact that it does so within the context of the Iraq War, a conflict that’s largely been treated by Hollywood with ponderous moralizing.…
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Dead Snow (2009): B-
Tommy Wirkola does the time warp with Dead Snow, self-consciously shouting out to his favorite ‘80s horror films – Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, April Fool’s Day – while unevenly replicating Sam Raimi’s whirligig blend of terror and comedy. With a set-up so archetypal it has to be overtly noted as such, a group of…
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Blood: The Last Vampire (2000): C
Blood: The Last Vampire combines hand-drawn characters and computer-generated environments to create an aesthetic that imparts a chilling sense of otherworldly unease. Were the story even half as compelling as the imagery, Hiroyuki Kitakubo might have crafted an animé classic. As is, however, his supernatural story skimps so heavily on narrative details that it can…
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I Love You, Man (2009): C+
Taking the bromance subgenre to its logical end point, I Love You, Man follows engaged, friendless Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) as he embarks on a series of platonic dates with guys to find a best man, and eventually falls into a budding hetero relationship with single Rush fanatic Sydney Fife (Jason Segel). John Hamburg’s film…
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Quarantine (2008): B-
The third of 2008’s first-person-perspective horror outings after Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead, Quarantine uses its aesthetic conceit for a zombie tale that’s not as frightening as it should be, but still better than the average Hollywood scare-a-thon. An adaptation of Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s Spanish-language original [Rec], John Erick Dowdle’s film is…
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Taken (2009): B
Single-minded and suitably rough around the edges, Taken offers B-movie action via a story that plays out like a modern-day version of Hardcore. After a lifetime spent putting his covert-ops job before his family, divorcé Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson), in an attempt to rehabilitate his relationship with 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), reluctantly agrees to…
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Coraline (2009): A-
Among Coraline’s many triumphs is its employment of 3-D as an immersive technique that doesn’t bring the action to you (via gimmicky shots of stuff leaping out at the audience) but, rather, invites you inside the action’s cinematic space. The rich, layered depth of director Henry Selick’s 3-D images provides a purely sensory thrill, amplifying…
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Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008): C
Leave it to Woody Allen to muck up a threesome involving Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz. Then again, given that Allen’s recent track record has been uniformly blah – to the point that even bemoaning his fall-from-grace has become a tiresome requirement of critiquing his yearly output – it’s hardly surprising to find Vicky Cristina…
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Them (2006): C
David Moreau and Xavier Palud’s Them uses, as its basis, [spoilers follow] a killing spree perpetrated by a group of French kids between the ages of 10 and 15. The youthfulness of its villains is, I presume, supposed to make its story more chilling, though the opposite unfortunately holds true. Once it becomes clear that…
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Good (2008): C+
As with this season’s Adam Resurrected, Good’s most impactful moment involves concentration camp prisoners playing, with orchestral instruments, a lyrical death march for impending gas chamber victims. And like Paul Schrader’s film, Vicente Amorim’s drama – adapted from C.P. Taylor’s 1981 play – is otherwise decidedly blunt and unaffecting. In 1933 Germany, liberal professor John…
