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Resident Evil: Extinction (2007): C
Resident Evil: Extinction, the third installment in the based-on-a-videogame franchise, is also its Back to the Future III, a Western-tinged adventure whose innovations are so scant that the only things keeping the enterprise afloat are clumsy references to its predecessors. Milla Jovovich returns again, flipping and karate-kicking T-virus-infected dogs, which – like the introductory sight…
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4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007): B+
The Palm d’Or-winning toast of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is the latest Romanian import (after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East to Bucharest) to arrive stateside with an established critical-darling rep. And Cristian Mungiu’s film doesn’t disappoint, charting with blunt realism and intense humanism the…
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American Trash
The hate mail has already started pouring in about my review of American Gangster, Ridley Scott’s heavily hyped, Oscar-contending gangster saga. Of course, if any of these naysayers had actually seen the film in question, they’d know what a dog it is. Read all about it – as well as some other notable new releases…
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Starting Out in the Evening (2007): B-
As with last year’s Venus, Starting Out in the Evening stars a venerable actor in a May-December romance, though its concerns are less the nature of sexual hunger than the possibility of reinvention and the importance of seizing the moment. New York novelist Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), his four novels long since out of print,…
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Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007): B
Part heist-gone-awry crime pic, part family drama, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead finds the 83-year-old director once again in fine form after 2005’s dreadful Find Me Guilty. Comfortably ensconced in its maker’s beloved New York milieu, the film charts the build-up to, and fallout from, the robbery of a Westchester mom-and-pop jewelry…
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Monday Night Catch-Up
Time for yet another delayed link dump – featuring my remaining NYFF coverage for Slant – in which I provide links to reviews both positive (No Country for Old Men, Gone Baby Gone) and negative (Lars and the Real Girl, Reservation Road). Plus, I also offer up my thoughts on Criterion’s new DVD release of…
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Rendition (2007): D+
The latest piece of preening liberal-guilt cinema, Gavin Hood’s Rendition is laughably melodramatic and agonizingly inert, more interested in its pretzel-y narrative structure than issues of torture, justice and “extraordinary rendition,” the policy in which terror suspects are transferred and indefinitely imprisoned in foreign countries. On his way home from an unspecified business meeting in…
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Covering Pitt
My last two articles for SOMA magazine – an August 2007 feature on Julie Delpy, and a September 2007 piece on Paul Haggis – never made it online, so I’m very happy to report that my latest contribution has recently been posted on the mag’s site. It’s the October’s issue’s cover story: a profile of…
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The Fest Continues…
We’re into the New York Film Festival’s press screening stretch run, so after this week, posts should hopefully be more frequent. In the meantime, though, here’s a quick link dump. Out Now: Michael Clayton (Slant magazine) Finishing the Game (Slant magazine) The Good Night (Slant magazine) NYFF: I’m Not There (Slant magazine)
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Redacted (2007): C
Brian De Palma’s Redacted uses a variety of multimedia means to fictionally recount the true-life 2006 rape and murder of a young Iraqi woman by U.S. soldiers: surveillance camera footage, YouTube-ish Internet videos, a pretentious French documentary, and, most of all, the camcorder diary of Private Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz) shot during his tour of…
