[8] Writer/director Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt) takes us on a trip through California wine country with two middle-aged college buddies in Sideways, based on a novel by Rex Pickett. Paul Giamatti plays a divorced junior high school teacher suffering from depression and anxiety whose dream of becoming a published author is about the only thing keeping him going. Thomas Haden Church is a somewhat …
[5] You know the drill: a family moves into a new home, weird shit starts happening, SURPRISE. Ghosts. A Haunting in Connecticut is a so-so haunted house movie with some interesting concepts and hackneyed execution. The mother-son relationship between Kyle Gallner and Virginia Madsen is almost strong enough to keep you invested, but the movie ultimately aschews character and becomes desperately preoccupied with plot twists …
[8] Dino DeLaurentiis foots the bill for this gravely ambitious film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel about the messianic rise of an off-lander who rallies a reclusive desert civilization in a fight against galactic takeover. Hot off The Elephant Man, David Lynch was chosen as director — a bold but inspired choice. And in the end, it’s Lynch’s style and aesthetic taste that …
[7] This is the kind of ’80s cheese that works for me. Virginia Madsen plays a girl trapped in Catholic school. Craig Sheffer plays a convict in a correctional camp pretty close to Madsen’s school. The two meet in the woods one day, instantly fall for one another, but can’t get any mackin’ time for all the nuns and nasty wardens. So they plot a …
[9] Director David O. Russell (The Fighter, Three Kings) sticks with his good luck charm, casting Jennifer Lawrence as the title character in Joy. Russell has said that his film career started to disinterest him several years back, and that he became reinvigorated when he decided to start telling stories about very specific people in very specific places. If you watch The Fighter or Joy, you …
[6] Jim Carrey stars as a man who discovers a book that he believes is about him, sinking him further and further into a murder mystery that proposes the killer is, quite literally, the number 23. Carrey is good and director Joel Schumacher’s (A Time to Kill, Flatliners) direction is taut, if a little too hyper-stylized for the material. I don’t put stock in numerology, …
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