Film: Artery, Indy Week

DVD+Digital: Mike Leigh, British food trucks and Life is Sweet

Glenn McDonald — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 15:41:00 -0400

British filmmaker Mike Leigh is known for his very particular way of making films. Rather than start with a script, Leigh works with his actors in a designated improvisation period before filming begins.…

A very strong new kid: Man of Steel delivers the goods with a straight face

Neil Morris — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:50:00 -0400

MAN OF STEEL

Opens today

How to make a better Superman movie is the Sphinx’s riddle of superhero cinema. There’s nostalgia for Richard Donner’s soaring but cumbersome 1978 original and Richard Lester’s able but somewhat nutty sequel.…

Suffer the little children: What Maisie Knew is easy to admire, hard to watch

Glenn McDonald — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 15:43:00 -0400

What Maisie Knew

Opens Friday (see times below)

Carefully written and beautifully photographed, the child custody drama What Maisie Knew is an undeniably moving film with strong performances from everyone involved.

It's also extremely hard to watch, and I don't know that I would recommend it.…

DVD+Digital: Spalding Gray, the theater of war and Swimming to Cambodia

Glenn McDonald — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 16:31:00 -0400

I first saw Swimming to Cambodia — the film version of Spalding Gray's groundbreaking monologue — on VHS my senior year of high school, by way of my first serious girlfriend Courtney. A fellow theater nerd, Courtney was also a dedicated goth girl and introduced me to many new and exotic things, like Bauhaus records and the BBC punk comedy The Young Ones.…

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DVD+Digital: Ex-cons, Viagra jokes and Stand Up Guys

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 23 May 2013 16:42:00 -0400

Slight, shaggy and sentimental, the crime comedy Stand Up Guys has exactly three virtues to recommend it.

Those would be the film's trio of lead actors: Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin.…
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Star Trek Into Darkness is cute but insubstantial

Neil Morris — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:38:00 -0400

STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS

Opens Friday (see times below)

The title Star Trek Into Darkness remains just as nebulous by the time the closing credits roll as it does during a chase prologue along the Class M Planet of Nibiru. Fortunately, director J.J. Abrams inadvertently provides a number of alternate titles along the way.…
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DVD+Digital: Rooney Mara, antidepressants and Side Effects

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 16 May 2013 23:44:00 -0400

The latest and maybe final film from director Steven Soderbergh, Side Effects isn't the movie that it first appears to be. About halfway through, the story pivots and another film emerges.…
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DVD+Digital: Shane Carruth, psychic orchids and Upstream Color

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:06:00 -0400

Filmmaker Shane Carruth made his bones in the indie film world with the 2004 science fiction puzzle Primer. The ultra-low budget film, concerning a group of engineers who accidentally invent time travel, collected the Grand Jury Prize at that year's Sundance Film Festival.…
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Canned ham: More Downey, less Iron Man

Neil Morris — Fri, 03 May 2013 09:15:00 -0400

IRON MAN 3

Opens today

In every conceivable way, Tony Stark’s foe in Iron Man 3 is himself. It starts with an enemy born of Stark’s chronic dickishness, a spurned fan-turned-supervillain not unlike Buddy Pine-cum-Syndrome in The Incredibles.…
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DVD+Digital: Cyborgs, Shakespeare and Star Trek: The Next Generation

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:06:00 -0400

If you only pay attention to what cycles around to Redbox, Netflix or your old-school video rental place, you might get the sense that only a handful of new home video titles get released each week.

Not so.…
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DVD+Digital: Guns, Molls and Gangster Squad

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:01:00 -0400

The period L.A. crime drama Gangster Squad — starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone — is best known for its poor timing. Following the movie theater mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012, the release date for Gangster Squad was bumped.…
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DVD+Digital: Cold feet, Lizzy Caplan and Save the Date

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:22:00 -0400

The indie romantic dramedy Save the Date — new to DVD, Blu-ray and digital this week — starts in awfully familiar territory.

Twenty-something Sarah (Lizzy Caplan) is a bookstore clerk and aspiring artist who's about to have her sketches premiere in a small gallery.…
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DVD+Digital: True love, bat demons and The Sorcerer and the White Snake

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 09:20:00 -0400

And now for something completely different.

A loopy Buddhist fable in the shape of a blockbuster action pic, The Sorcerer and the White Snake features several big-name Hong Kong stars battling snakes, demons and one another in ancient China.…
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It's a sweaty, chaotic ride to The Place Beyond the Pines

Nathan Gelgud — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:27:00 -0400

The Place Beyond the Pines

Now playing

Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines is a tattered melodrama that reaches fevered pitches out of nowhere and ambles with confidence through its baggy plot. It’s a sweaty ride, shifting in and out of rapid speeds that come in spurts, a lot like Ryan Gosling on his getaway motorbike, zipping through Schenectady, N.Y., against oncoming traffic to suddenly curve off onto a damp side street.…
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Here's to you, Jackie Robinson: A flawed take on a baseball great in 42

Nathan Gelgud — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:47:00 -0400

42

Opens Friday (see times below)

“You’re medicine, Jack!” growls Harrison Ford as Branch Rickey, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, in writer-director Brian Helgeland’s 42. He’s talking, of course, to Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman), the Negro League player whom he’s hired to play in the big leagues, breaking baseball’s color barrier.…
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6 Souls is beyond salvation

Craig D. Lindsey — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0400

6 SOULS

Now playing (see times below)

Movies like 6 Souls, which creeps into theaters and VOD sites, remind me how psychological thrillers or supernatural thrillers or thrillers period are always tricky to pull off. These flicks always must walk a tightrope of staying intensely, viscerally plausible without falling off and descending into complete ridiculousness.…
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Jurassic Park 3D keeps the effects in check

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 20:36:00 -0400

Jurassic Park 3D

Opens Friday (see times below)

If ever there were a film that justified a re-release in 3D format, it's Steven Spielberg's dinosaurs-run-amok blockbuster Jurassic Park. In both its visual style and its pulpy adventure spirit, Jurassic Park was pretty much 3D already when it hit theaters 20 years ago.

The good news is that the 3D effects in the new edition of Jurassic Park, screening locally in select IMAX theaters as well, are used with evident care and restraint.…
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DVD+Digital: Baseball lore, Jedi masters and Knuckleball

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 09:41:00 -0400

Behold the mysterious knuckleball.

Unlike baseball's other pitches — the fastball, the curve, the slider — the knuckleball does not rely on spin and velocity to defeat hitters at the plate.…
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DVD+Digital: Crime thrillers, Swedish gangsters and Easy Money

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:37:00 -0400

Johan "JW" Westlund, ace student at the Stockholm School of Economics, likes to take risks. A poor kid from the Swedish equivalent of Iowa, JW hobnobs with the capital city rich kids, pretending to a wealth he doesn't have and lying to everyone he knows.…
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Beat connection: A scattered but satisfying On the Road

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:55:00 -0400

On the Road

Opens Friday (see times below)

It's said that God protects drunks, fools and little children. If so, He must have been working overtime during Jack Kerouac's prime rambling days, at least as depicted in On the Road, the new film adaptation of Kerouac's most famous book.…
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DVD+Digital: Terence Malick, deep focus and Badlands

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:48:00 -0400

One of the more auspicious debuts in film history, the 1973 drama Badlands was director Terrence Malick's first project after film school. Loosely based on the real-life killing spree of Charles Starkweather in 1958, it stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as Kit and Holly, two young lovers on the lam in the badlands of the American West.…
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DVD+Digital: Sholem Aleichem, Mark Twain and Laughing in the Darkness

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:28:00 -0400

The well-made 90-minute film documentary may be mankind's most efficient mode of communication. When put together by skilled filmmakers, the feature-length documentary can convey quite massive amounts of information while providing wit and heart and functioning as, you know, a movie.…
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A gorgeous but flimsy Oz

Glenn McDonald — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 08:29:00 -0500

Oz the Great and Powerful
** stars
Opens Friday

In the opening scenes of Oz the Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi's pretty but rickety prequel to The Wizard of Oz, huckster stage magician Oscar Diggs (James Franco) is preparing for his show with traveling circus. The year is 1905.…
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DVD+Digital: Eco horror, crustaceous isopods and The Bay

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:06:00 -0500

It's Fourth of July in the seaside tourist town of Claridge, Md., on the Chesapeake Bay. All is well.…
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DVD+Digital: Brando, Kazan and On The Waterfront

Glenn McDonald — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:45:00 -0500

Director Elia Kazan's classic 1954 drama On The Waterfront tells the story of dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), a once-promising boxer whose life is derailed when he gets mixed up with mobbed-up labor union honchos on the NYC waterfront. As you may have heard, Terry coulda been a contender.…
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