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Toy story

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Screen

A solid but soulless adaptation

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Sleek and, until a stupidly violent climax, very entertaining, Unknown is the opposite of Memento. It’s about a man who knows who he is but everybody around him has forgotten, or thinks he’s delusional, or lying...

‘X-Men’ meets ‘90210’

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Imagine the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210 being dropped into Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters from the X-Men movies and you’ll have a sense of the uneven pastiche that is I Am Number Four...

Movie Madness

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It seems nerve-wracking. Showing more than 50 films over four days at numerous venues in one small city. Hosting world-class celebrities including Oliver Stone and James Franco. Organizing a mostly volunteer staff of almost 300 people. Seated on a couch in the ...

The Bard via gnomes

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Two households, both alike in dignity / In fair Verona, where we lay our scene / From ancient grudge break to new mutiny...

A film of great scowling

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Actors learn only by doing, and by getting in over their heads. In the heyday of the Hollywood studio era, often they’d do this while wearing extremely heavy battle garb, surrounded by extras yelling “Aarrrrrghhhh!” as they run toward the enemy...

The terror of St. Valentine

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Let´s face a simple fact about Valentine’s Day: there are fewer things less romantic than being forced to be romantic along with the rest of the world. Instead of crowded restaurants and run-of-the-mill flower bouquets, forget the Hallmark holiday spirit this year ...

Flood of clichés

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Photographed with the same image acquisition technology James Cameron used on Avatar, the movie on which we can blame most of the cruddy 3-D films since, the new suspense thriller Sanctum, executive-produced by Cameron, presents images (underwater, generally) of ...

Sensationalism, not drama

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One of the great mysteries of filmgoing relates to a question the medium has posed since its infancy: When is “too much” just right...

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in Documentary at the Sundance...

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A penetrating look at death and dying, How to Die in Oregon is an HBO-produced documentary that explores the lives of people suffering from debilitating terminal illness.  Oregon was the first state in the nation to legalize physician-assisted suicide in 1994, and, ...

To see a man about a demon

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Offering moderately scary Roman Catholic “gotchas!” to a global film audience of all creeds, The Rite comes from director Mikael Hafstrom, whose previous film was the stylish supernatural thriller 1408...

Mechanical failure

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The Mechanic is Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham), a crack assassin who can kill his targets without leaving a trace, and even — as we learn later — implicate third parties in the crime. Impressive. Except as we watch Bishop blunder his way through target after target, ...

Company bust

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A single spontaneous moment pops up in the otherwise obsessively well-ordered ensemble drama The Company Men, written and directed by ER and West Wing alum John Wells. It’s a quick shot in a hotel room tryst of Maria Bello bopping back into frame, unexpectedly, ...