[7] Julianne Moore stars in this true story based on the life of Evelyn Ryan, a ’50s housewife and mother of ten who kept her family afloat by writing award-winning marketing jingles. Director Jane Anderson manages to keep the movie light and airy, which keeps in tone with Evelyn’s indomitable spirit, but without short shrifting the film’s more serious, underlying statements about gender roles. Both …
[3] In this morose and supremely depressing film from Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland), a troubled college student (Ryan Gosling) seeks the help of a shrink (Ewan McGregor), who then investigates the boy’s life to see if there might be any merit to his vow to commit suicide later that week. I might have liked Stay better if it were a reality-based drama, but …
[6] In the world of shady post-9/11 politics, an innocent man (Omar Metwally) is seized by the CIA and tortured in a foreign country while his wife (Reese Witherspoon) and a doubtful CIA analyst (Jake Gyllenhaal) work on opposite sides of the world to help him. Rendition is a solid drama/thriller from Gavin Hood (Tsotsi, Ender’s Game), who refrains from sensationalizing any violence or indulging …
[7] Is Michelle Pfeiffer seeing a ghost in her lakeside home, or is she just losing her mind? That’s the premise behind this intimate thriller from director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Back to the Future). Pfeiffer does a fine job and Harrison Ford is interestingly cast as her husband, a role that turns out to be more against his type than you’d imagine. The story …
[1] Pulse is astonishingly bad in almost every way imaginable. The only nice thing I can say about it is that leading lady Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) seems to be doing the best she can with the material. But other than that, the film is like staring into a giant anus that never stops shitting on you. First there’s the idiotic concept — dead people …
[7] As if pre-teen and teenaged girls didn’t already scare the shit out of me, Catherine Hardwicke (who later helmed the first Twilight flick) had to go ahead and direct this harrowing descent into hormonal angst. Evan Rachel Wood turns in a fine performance as Tracy, a young lady we barely get to know before she’s experimenting with needles, drugs, petty crime, sex, cutting herself, …
[7] This decent little horror anthology produced by Bryan Singer serves up four tales of Halloween fright. Each of the stories feels like a small-town myth, the kind that haunts a community for generations. I particularly liked the one about a school bus driver who murders a bus load of ‘special needs’ kids. Other plot lines involve a high school principal who has it out …
[5] Talk about a hard pitch. Try to follow me here. So, there’s this kid. And whenever something dramatic is about to happen to him, his memory blacks out. He basically jumps a minute or two into the future, all confused and shit, and never knows what transpired. Then, when he’s in college (and played by Ashton Kutcher, fresh off That 70s Show), he is …
[4] SPOILER REVIEW Within the first half-hour of Abandon, a police detective (Benjamin Bratt) asks an ambitious college student (Katie Holmes) about her missing boyfriend. The college student doesn’t seem to care that her boyfriend is missing, so I immediately thought, hmmm… I bet she killed him. And she did. Boy, do I hate being right. Especially when the rest of the entire film is …
[3] While trying to lose their virginity, two college guys discover some of the girls on campus are actually terrifying creatures from outer space. You’re either going to like that summary or you’re not. Decoys is a low-budget flick with respectable ambitions, but its thin story needs to rest on stronger characters and more charismatic actors. The lead boy (Corey Sevier) is easy on the …
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