February 2010
28 posts
Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Feb. 1-7, 2010
Near Dark (IFC, Tuesday, February 2, 5:45pm – 95 mins.)
With Kathryn Bigelow reminding everyone how great of a director she can be with 2009’s award-winning The Hurt Locker, it is a good time to remind yourself of how she got here. While Bigelow has never been close to the Academy Awards, she has garnered a number of genre fans for some of her iconic films. She earned the love of...
January 2010
56 posts
Shawn S. Lealos' Top 10 Movies of 2009
10. Sherlock Holmes 9. Zombieland 8. Avatar 7. The Brothers Bloom 6. Up 5. Moon 4. The Hurt Locker 3. The Lovely Bones 2. 12 1. Inglourious Basterds
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George Lang Review: Edge of Darkness
Full of sharp shocks and hard turns, “Edge of Darkness” finds that fine middle ground between film noir, Alfred Hitchcock and ’70s conspiracy thrillers such as “The Parallax View” and “Three Days of the Condor.” Mel Gibson makes his return to starring roles in familiar emotional territory, but his intensity level is well-suited to a story of parental grief, corporate malfeasance...
George Lang Review: Crazy Heart
Few movie subjects are easier to botch than music and the people who play it, and those who make their living in or around music can smell an inauthentic portrayal from the next county. For the record, there is not a moment of Scott Cooper’s “Crazy Heart” that rings false, thanks in large part to an extraordinarily resonant and believable performance by Jeff Bridges.
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Michael Smith Review: Crazy Heart
The topic of Jeff Bridges never dominates a discussion of Hollywood’s best actors because his gift is that of restraint, which inherently makes his acting go unnoticed at times.
He is charismatic, unforgettable and yet again restrained in “Crazy Heart,” playing a broken-down country singer running out of second chances. At last, Bridges has found that once-in-a-lifetime role...
Michael Smith Review: The Maid
Quirky in its humor and painfully honest in its portrayal of a woman in crisis, “The Maid” is a Spanish-language comedy of manners about family and loneliness.
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Joe Wertz Review: Extraordinary Measures
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Mike Robertson Review: Half-Life
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Clif' Warren Review: A Single Man
Whatever its achievements, “A Single Man” remains a niche film for a literate, educated audience; yet it is somehow being dismissed as an exercise in gay aesthetics.
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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Book of Eli
Book of Eli has everything you want in a January release and so much more.
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James Cooper's Best Films of the Decade
The beautiful nightmare decade came to an uneventful end. Three numbers and bastards flying planes into the World Trade Center haunt the aught years. Not to make too big a deal of it but the images of folk meandering, dazed down the gray streets of downtown New York City stuck. And, say what you will, but the best cinema of the aughts feels weirdly haunted by those images, that moment that...
Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Jan. 25 - Jan. 31,...
The Ladykillers (TCM, Monday, January 25, 2:15pm – 91 mins.
This wonderful black comedy from 1955 is the original film the Coen Brothers remade with Tom Hanks a few years ago. It stars Alec Guinness as a dangerously deranged criminal who’s used well his time in the mental asylum by planning the perfect robbery. Assisting him are Peter Sellers and Herbert Lom, who would later gain fame as...
Michael Smith Review: Extraordinary Measures
Movies like “Extraordinary Measures,” a medical drama about a couple desperate to treat their children’s rare disease, usually fail due to the same diagnosis: too many grim faces, too many cliched lines, as sappy as a sugar maple tree.
“Extraordinary Measures” is absolutely ordinary in suffering from most of these ills except for the effort to jerk tears out of...
Kim Brown Review: Tooth Fairy
I’ll admit that it’s amusing to see Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson dolled up in a frilly, pink tutu in “Tooth Fairy.” But is the joke funny enough to sustain another hour and 42 minutes?
The answer is a painful no.
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Michael Smith Review: The Private Lives of Pippa...
We are not the same person at 40 as we were at 20; people are sometimes not who we thought they were; children have difficulty imagining grandparents as having ever been little boys and girls. It’s an interesting concept taken to neurotic heights in “The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” a comedy of manners that, in tone and structure, is often as confused as its lead character.
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Michael Smith Review: The Spy Next Door
From the musty, dusty, moldy oldies pile of family comedies comes “The Spy Next Door,” the kind of dull bunk that wouldn’t have been original 50 years ago.
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George Lang's Best Films of the Decade
If the character of a decade is reflected in the mood of its films, then the 2000s, or the aughts, were about anxiety over a future that looks more and more like dystopia, and a desire to escape from our present into a sun-dappled rock ’n’ roll past, the Middle Earth of our fantasies, the underworld of our nightmares or the clinic that can erase our inescapable failings.
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Matthew Price's Best Films of the Decade
One of the dominant trends in movies from 2000-09 was the rise of the superhero movie.
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Gene Triplett's Best Films of the Decade
Armed-and-dangerous characters played prominent roles in many of my favorite films of the past decade, and I hesitate to seek professional analysis of my taste for movie mayhem.
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Brandy McDonnell's Best Movies of the Decade
When it comes to defining a decade, the word “best” takes on a weightier meaning.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Extraordinary Measures
Even Oklahomans who can forgive the filmmakers for snubbing our capital city will find “Extraordinary Measures” a less than extraordinary cinematic experience.
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Kathryn Jenson White Review: A Single Man
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Mike Robertson Review: The Messenger
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Doug Bentin Review: The Lovely Bones
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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Jan. 18 - 24, 2010
Starting Out in the Evening (Sundance, Tuesday, Jan. 19, 8:45 p.m.)
Love and power. Who has the latter where the former is concerned? Some would say the young can’t help but trump the old when sexuality and love are in the cards. Others fall back on the idea that age and wisdom outwit youth and beauty no matter what the arena. That’s one of the themes explored in this really good...
Kim Brown Review: The Book of Eli
Apparently, audiences need a post-apocalyptic movie with a bit of oomph, or in the case of “The Book of Eli,” a major movie star.
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Michael Smith Review: A Single Man
“A Single Man” is the most visually stunning movie about a broken heart ever made. The renowned clothing designer Tom Ford has fashioned a riveting directing debut.
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Kim Brown Review: The Lovely Bones
It might not be as epic, but “Lord of the Rings” and “King Kong” director Peter Jackson immerses himself in another world of fantasy in “The Lovely Bones.” Adapted from Alice Sebold’s haunting novel, Jackson delivers with pristine details, a terrific cast and thoughtful consideration of the text.
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Michael Smith Review: Broken Embraces
“Broken Embraces” is a uniquely Pedro Almodovar motion picture experience. The primary colors explode, his nods to beloved films of the past amuse, sex is on every character’s mind and Penelope Cruz never looked so lovely.
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George Lang Review: The Lovely Bones
Peter Jackson’s “The Lovely Bones” does many things right, which makes all the wrong things so blatant and disappointing.
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George Lang Review: A Single Man
“A Single Man” gives new meaning to that perky little phrase “live each day as if it were your last.”
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Mike Robertson Review: The Imaginarium of Dr....
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Doug Bentin Review: Daybreaekers
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Joe Wertz Review: 35 Shots of Rum
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Joe Wertz Review: The Beaches of Agnes
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Clif' Warren Review: It's Complicated
When Nancy Meyers is directing a film, you can be sure women over age forty-five are going to have a heyday viewing it. Meyers loves to give older guys a rough time and allow mature women to reign supreme. Her latest effort, “It’s Complicated,” tops a career of some 20 years of box office smash hits.
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Shawn S. Lealos Review: The Messenger
Woody Harrelson is getting a lot of awards attention for this movie, but he is just icing on the cake of this tremendous film.
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Coming Soon to a TV Near You, Jan. 11 - 17, 2010
“I thought he was your patient …”
Night Nurse (TCM, Thursday, Jan. 14, 6:15 am)
In 1931’s Night Nurse, director William Wellman finds plenty of excuses for Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell to strip down to their undies. It’s among the many delightfully trashy pleasures of this pre-Production Code melodrama in which Stanwyck plays a nurse assigned to the home of a drunken...
Michael Smith Review: Daybreakers
“Daybreakers” is the first vampire movie of 2010 (but not the last), and it arrives with both style and substance, if more of the former than the latter.
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George Lang Review: Leap Year
Audiences don’t go to a movie like “Leap Year” looking for surprises, and that’s a good thing, because there is no such thing as a “spoiler” for this Amy Adams/Matthew Goode romantic comedy. Since it plays by every single convention of its genre — an unexpected plot twist might put everyone involved into a state of shock — “Leap Year” is left to survive almost entirely on the...
Michael Smth Review: Youth in Revolt
Michael Cera can’t forever play a teenage boy in search of love or lust or some combination of the two. That’s almost a shame because there are lot of lousy movies made in this genre, and he seems to be in most of the good ones. Cera used TV’s brilliant “Arrested Development” as a training ground for a character type he would riff on in “Juno,”...
Michael Smith Review: The Imaginarium of Dr....
It’s easy to imagine a traveling freak show and a three-ring circus crashing into one another inside Terry Gilliam’s mind, creating a horrible mess that you can’t look away from. This fairly describes “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” his newest film.
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Michael Smith Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call...
“Bad Lieutenant” is a hot mess of a movie, occasionally fascinating but so much more often a disorganized display of discombulation.
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Brandy McDonnell Review: Youth in Revolt
Quirky animation sequences, Michael Cera as two halves of one single-minded teen psyche and a strong supporting cast aid in “Youth in Revolt’s” mission to turn out a funny, if hardly revolutionary, new entry in the teen sex comedy genre.
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George Lang Review: Broken Embraces
Pedro Almodovar’s “Broken Embraces” is as much a love letter to the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles as it is to his star, Penelope Cruz. It is about moviemakers, the creative process and the drama that surrounds them. When one character opines at the sight of his wounded lover that “People don’t fall down stairs — that only happens in films,” it’s because it just happened in...
Brandy McDonnell Review: The Imaginarium of Dr....
“The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” may be best known as the late Heath Ledger’s final film, but it has all the hallmarks of a Terry Gilliam movie, from the bizarrely colorful fantasy sequences and memorably oddball characters to the surreal, rambling plot and the near-crippling production calamity.
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Shawn S. Lealos Review: Leap Year
The first rom-com of the year has arrived but is it worth letting your girl drag you to see?
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Phil Bacharach Review: Broken Embraces
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Doug Bentin Review: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The...
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Clif' Warren Review: Up in the Air
“Up in the Air” is the ideal film for George Clooney fans. It allows him to shine all that Cary Grant charm and savoir faire on his public, and the plot suits him perfectly.
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