‘Addicted to Fame’ With Anna Nicole Smith and John James.
More about Addicted to Fame Film
Director : David Giancola.
Writer : David Giancola.
Stars : Anna Nicole Smith, David Giancola and John James.
Genre : Documentary, Biography, Comedy, News.
Runtime : 89 minute.
A documentary that goes behind the scenes of the movie Illegal Aliens,
and a filmmaker's journey from obscurity to moral blindness in the
seductive glare of the media spotlight.
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‘California Solo’ With Robert Carlyle and Kathleen Wilhoite.
More about California Solo Film
Director : Marshall Lewy.
Writer : Marshall Lewy.
Stars : Robert Carlyle, Alexia Rasmussen and Kathleen Wilhoite.Genre : Drama.
Runtime : 94 minute.
A former Britpop rocker who now works on a farm gets caught driving
drunk and faces deportation after living in Los Angeles for many years.
His efforts to stay in the U.S. force him to confront the past and
current demons in his life.
ToviewWatch Live California Solopleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
‘The Collection’ With Josh Stewart and Christopher McDonald.
More about The Collection Film
Director : Marcus Dunstan.
Writers : Marcus Dunstan (screenplay), Patrick Melton (screenplay).
Stars : Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick and Christopher McDonald.Genre : Action, Horror, Thriller.
Runtime : 82 minute.
When the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur is abducted by a serial
killer known as The Collector, the young woman's desperate father hires a
team of mercenaries to ensure her safe return in this bloody sequel to
the shocking hit that had horror fans screaming for their lives. Elena
(Emma Fitzpatrick) was attending a secret warehouse party when The
Collector abducted her and locked her away in his own personal house of
pain -- an abandoned hotel filled with deadly traps. When Elena's father
(Christopher McDonald)
learns of his daughter's grim fate, he pays a team of heavily armed
opportunists to come to her rescue. But in order to beat The Collector
on his own home turf, they'll need the help of Arkin (Josh Stewart) --
the only man who has confronted the monster and lived to tell the tale.
But even with Arkin calling the shots, there's no guarantee that anyone,
including Elena, will survive the evil that dwells within The
Collector's diabolical maze of doom.
ToviewWatch Live The Collectionpleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
‘Killing Them Softly’ With Brad Pitt and Richard Jenkins.
More about Killing Them Softly Film
Director : Andrew Dominik.
Producer : Dede Gardner, Brad Pitt, Paula Mae Schwartz & Steve Schwartz.
Writers : Andrew Dominik (screenplay), George V. Higgins (novel).
Stars : Brad Pitt, Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins.
Distributed : The Weinstein Company.
Release Date : Sep 20, 2012.Genre : Crime, Drama, Thriller.
Runtime : 97 minute.
THE struggle to win in a nation consumed by loss is one of the themes at the center of “Killing Them Softly”
(due Nov. 30 from the Weinstein Company), a crime drama set during the
2008 election season, as the economic crisis is unfolding. Presidential
addresses and campaign speeches play on television sets in the
background throughout a movie in which sound is used in uncharacteristic
ways to augment the narrative.
Directed by Andrew Dominik (“The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”) and adapted from the George V. Higgins novel “Cogan’s Trade,” the film is populated by small-time gangsters (including Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn in a cast that also includes Brad Pitt, James Gandolfini and Ray Liotta) who dream grandly but don’t always proceed wisely.
“Crime stories, to some extent, always felt like the capitalist ideal in
motion,” Mr. Dominik said recently, speaking by phone from Los Angeles.
“Because it’s the one genre where it’s perfectly acceptable for the
characters to be motivated solely by money.”
ToviewWatch Live Killing Them Softlypleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
‘The Central Park Five’ With Antron McCray and Kharey Wise.
More about The Central Park Five Film
Directors : Ken Burns, Sarah Burns.
Writers : Ken Burns, David McMahon.
Stars : Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson and Kharey Wise.Genre : Documentary.
Runtime : 119 minute.
The documentary “The Central Park Five”
revisits two New York nightmares. The first and most famous was the
rape and beating of a 28-year-old white woman who, very early on April
20, 1989, was found in Central Park bound, gagged, nearly naked and
nearly dead, her head crushed and shirt soaked in her blood. For years
she was known only as the Central Park jogger, and her assailants were
widely thought to be the five black and Latino teenagers, 14 to 16, who
were arrested in the attack. The directors Ken Burns,
David McMahon and Sarah Burns argue that the convictions, and the years
the defendants served for the crime they were later absolved of, were a
second, racially motivated crime.
It is a crime that remains fresh in memory partly because it was so
notorious, even though what looked like its final chapter was written a
decade ago. In 2002 a New York State Supreme Court judge, Charles J.
Tejada, after being presented with a confession and DNA evidence from a murderer and serial rapist, Matias Reyes, overturned the convictions of the men who became known as the Central Park Five. Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Kharey Wise and Yusef Salaam
had already served sentences of almost 7 to 13 years for the assault
when they were exonerated. Their records were wiped clean, and they were
also presumably liberated from the public stain of what the mayor at
the time, Edward I. Koch, has called “the crime of the century.”
‘Rust and Bone’ With Marion Cotillard and Armand Verdure.
More about Rust and Bone Film
Director : Jacques Audiard.
Producer : Jacques Audiard, Martine Cassinelli & Pascal Caucheteux.
Writers : Jacques Audiard (screenplay), Thomas Bidegain (screenplay).
Stars : Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts and Armand Verdure.
Distributed : Sony Pictures Classics.
Release Date : Nov 23, 2012.Genre : Drama, Romance.
Runtime : 120 minute.
Sam and his father, Ali (Matthias
Schoenaerts), fleeing a very bad, vaguely described situation with the
boy’s mother, arrive in Antibes, a sun-kissed town on the Côte d’Azur
that has rarely looked less glamorous. Mr. Audiard allows a few glimpses
of palm trees, beaches and sparkling Mediterranean waters, but his
greater interest is in the day-to-day blue-collar realities of people
like Ali and his sister, Anna (Corinne Masiero), a supermarket cashier
in whose home Sam and Ali land.
Not that “Rust and Bone,”
class conscious though it is, concerns itself primarily with the social
realities of contemporary France. Some of those — economic hardship,
family breakdown, the persistent antagonism between management and labor
— linger in the background, much as the country’s ethnic and religious
divisions shadowed “A Prophet,”
Mr. Audiard’s galvanic 2010 prison drama. But this is, as the title
implies, a movie (freely adapted from stories by the Canadian writer
Craig Davidson) about more primal matters, and specifically about the
unlikely bond that forms between two damaged souls and the battered
bodies that house them.
Soon after Anna helps him find a job as a
nightclub bouncer, Ali, a former prizefighter, meets Stephanie (Marion Cotillard).
Nothing much passes between them at first, though he checks out her
legs and she witnesses, with quiet pleasure, his offhand humiliation of
the boyfriend she lives with but doesn’t much like. Later, after a
horrific, life-altering catastrophe, Stephanie finds Ali’s phone number
and, acting on an impulse she may not understand, calls him.
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‘Hitchcock’ With Anthony Hopkins and Scarlett Johansson.
More about Hitchcock Film
Director : Sacha Gervasi.
Producer : Alan Barnette, Joe Medjuck, Tom Pollock, Ivan Reitman & Tom Thayer.
Writers : John J. McLaughlin (screenplay), Stephen Rebello (based on the book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" by).
Stars : Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren and Scarlett Johansson.
Distributed : Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Release Date : Nov 23, 2012.Genre : Biography, Drama.
Runtime : 98 minute.
The credits for the new movie “Hitchcock”
state that it is based on a book by Stephen Rebello. It isn’t, not
really, though details and true stories from the book have been slipped
into the mix amid amusing performances, historical re-creations and
heavily perfumed fertilizer. The book, “Alfred Hitchcock
and the Making of ‘Psycho,’ ” is a fast, diverting read that, true to
its title, tracks how the master of suspense, sometimes with surprising
effort, made his influential, perverse shocker.
“Hitchcock,” by contrast, is rather like Norman Bates, that nervous
pretty boy with mommy issues and a bobbing Adam’s apple, in that it too
takes extravagant liberties with the dead.
It does so largely by doing what some
disreputable Hitchcock biographical books have done: It reads him
through his work, as if his movies were a direct reflection of his mind,
soul and deepest, darkest desires. To that end, it is 1959 and
Hitchcock — a fine Anthony Hopkins buried in a fat suit and under distracting facial prosthetics
— is casting about for a new project. He’s just come off one of his
greatest films, “North by Northwest,” which delighted the public and
critics, a nice upturn after the disappointing reception of another of
his supreme achievements, “Vertigo.” (In September, after five decades, “Vertigo” bumped “Citizen Kane” from the No. 1 spot in Sight and Sound’s critics’ poll of “the greatest films of all time.”)
At the premiere of “North by Northwest” a
reporter asks Hitchcock, “You’re the most famous director in the history
of the medium, but you’re 60 years old, shouldn’t you just quit while
you’re ahead?” Thus challenged Hitchcock searches for “something fresh,
something different.” What he finds is “Psycho.”
Written by Robert Bloch, the 1959 novel was inspired by the macabre
crimes of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin serial killer who decorated his home
with human body parts and can be blamed for legions of horror films,
including “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.” (Gein liked to walk around wearing the skin and body parts of his female victims, behavior echoed in “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which Mr. Hopkins plays a serial killer who’s the ultimate sophisticate.)
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‘Rise of the Guardians’ With Hugh Jackman and Isla Fisher.
More about Rise of the Guardians Film
Director : Peter Ramsey.
Producer : Nancy Bernstein & Christina Steinberg.
Writers : David Lindsay-Abaire (screenplay), William Joyce (book).
Stars : Hugh Jackman, Alec Baldwin and Isla Fisher.
Distributed : Paramount Pictures.
Release Date : Nov 21, 2012.
Genre : Animation, Adventure, Family, Fantasy.
Runtime : 97 minute.
When I was 5, I got a tough dose of reality from my friend Mark.
“There’s no such thing as Santa Claus,” he told me. “Santa Claus is
really your mother.” Learning this was no great tragedy, though it did
take me awhile to figure out exactly what he meant. It is every child’s
prerogative to believe in nonsense, and every child’s fate to lose at
least a portion of that belief.
The real puzzle is why adults should be so
invested in encouraging and protecting the superstitions of children.
The young are naturally credulous, imaginative creatures, and the rest
of us sentimentalize these cognitive facts by associating them with
innocence and wonder.
The new movie “Rise of the Guardians,”
for example, works so hard at celebrating wide eyes and naïve joy that
it comes close to spoiling its own intermittent wonderfulness. Directed
by Peter Ramsey and written by David Lindsay-Abaire (and based on a story by William Joyce),
“Rise of the Guardians,” like so much animated entertainment these
days, is by turns silly, maudlin and noisy, with just enough ingenuity
to make you wish it were better.
‘Red Dawn’ With Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson.
More about Red Dawn Film
Director : Dan Bradley.
Producer : Beau Flynn, Vincent Newman & Tripp Vinson.
Writers : Carl Ellsworth (screenplay), Jeremy Passmore (screenplay).
Stars : Chris Hemsworth, Isabel Lucas and Josh Hutcherson.
Distributed : Open Road Films (II).
Release Date : Nov 21, 2012.Genre : Action.
Runtime : 114 minute.
The ideal viewer for “Red Dawn,” a slicked-up redo of the 1984 John Milius war flick about a Soviet invasion (with Cuban and Nicaraguan support) of the United States, has to be Kim Jong-un,
the leader of North Korea. That’s because by changing the attackers to
North Koreans, the filmmakers have paid him a great compliment by making
his country a Hollywood villain. Thinking adults will find a North
Korean invasion the stuff of wing-nut fantasies, which — with kids who
just want to see guys shoot stuff up — is probably what the distributor
is banking on. Everyone else interested may want to go with the campy
flow, like a colleague who snorted of the invaders, “What, did they
paddle over in canoes?”
they parachute in by the digital zillions, by the looks of the jumpers
blooming in the sky shortly after the remake opens. The place is
Spokane, Wash., where, before the invasion, Friday night lights shine on
a high school quarterback, Matt (Josh Peck).
Headstrong and independent, Matt blows the game (he isn’t a team
player), ignoring sideline directives, but he has a pretty girlfriend,
Erica (Isabel Lucas), to comfort him. He also has a dead mom; a
supportive father (Brett Cullen); and an older brother to resent, learn
from and finally embrace: the pretty, laconic Jed (Chris Hemsworth),
who’s on leave from the Marines. Note: Jed is a team player.
ToviewWatch Live Red Dawnpleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
Director : Ang Lee.
Producer : Ang Lee, Gil Netter & David Womark.
Writers : David Magee (screenplay), Yann Martel (novel).
Stars : Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan and Adil Hussain.
Distributed : 20th Century Fox.
Release Date : Nov 21, 2012.Genre : Adventure, Drama.
Runtime : 127 minute.
It is spoiling nothing to disclose that Pi Patel, the younger son of an
Indian zoo owner, survives a terrible shipwreck during a storm in the
Pacific Ocean. That much you know from the very first scenes of “Life of Pi,” Ang Lee’s 3-D film adaptation of the wildly popular, arguably readable novel by Yann Martel.
A middle-aged Pi (the reliably engaging Irrfan Khan) tells the tale of
his earlier life to a wide-eyed Canadian novelist (Rafe Spall), so we
know that he made it through whatever ordeal we are about to witness.
Whether a viewer’s good will can survive until the shipwreck is another
matter. The older Pi introduces us to his younger self (played as a boy
by Ayush Tandon and as a teenager by Suraj Sharma), whose life is so
besotted by wonder that those in the audience who do not share his
slack-jawed piety might think that something is wrong with him, or
themselves.
ToviewWatch Live Life of Pipleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
Director : Ciaran Foy.
Writer : Ciaran Foy.
Stars : Aneurin Barnard, James Cosmo and Wunmi Mosaku.Genre : Drama, Horror, Thriller.
Runtime : 84 minute.
A young widower battles demons both actual and figurative in “Citadel,” a suburban nightmare with socioeconomic underpinnings.
After witnessing a brutal attack on his
pregnant wife by a band of marauding kids, Tommy (Aneurin Barnard) is
left with paralyzing agoraphobia and a baby daughter he can barely
relate to. Goggle-eyed and clenched, trapped in an anonymous concrete
desert where transport is scarce and utilities unreliable, Tommy finds
solace in a warmhearted hospice nurse (Wunmi Mosaku) and therapy to
modify his flinching body language. But when the fiendish imps — all
wearing identical hoodies — return to claim his daughter, Tommy
discovers there’s more to their viciousness than a lack of parental
supervision.
Shot primarily in and around some crumbling
tower blocks in Glasgow, “Citadel” occasionally veers into
ludicrousness, especially with the introduction of an angry priest
(James Cosmo) who turns out to have a connection to the murderous
minors. But this spare first feature from the Irish filmmaker Ciaran Foy
(drawing on his own experiences) has an atavistic pulse, evoking a
decaying society where elevators fail and bus drivers cower behind mesh
grills. Steeped in the fear of poverty, the film prompts us to wonder
what’s gestating in those low-income tower blocks: feral monsters or
economically deprived delinquents? Its mind is already made up.
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‘Price Check’ With Parker Posey and Annie Parisse.
More about Price Check Film
Director : Michael Walker.
Writer : Michael Walker.
Stars : Parker Posey, Eric Mabius and Annie Parisse.Genre : Comedy, Drama.
Runtime : 92 minute.
The indie film goddess Parker Posey cuts a ferociously funny swath through Michael Walker’s “Price Check,”
a corporate comedy that tells you more than you ever wanted to know
about the hypercompetitive world of retail marketing. In several scenes
where pricing strategies are analyzed and debated, your eyes may begin
to glaze over. But be patient; the verbal mumbo-jumbo lends the story a
necessary gloss of realism.
The moment Ms. Posey’s high-strung character,
Susan Felders, sets foot in the Long Island division of a fictional
supermarket chain, where she is the new boss, the lackadaisical
employees are jolted into action. Although ambitious, bossy and
abrasively rude, Susan is not a nightmarish dragon lady with a chip on
her shoulder. An enthusiastic, hard-driving cheerleader, she is a
sizzling live wire who whips her forces into action.
In her effort to mobilize team spirit, every employee is instructed to dress up for a Halloween
party at which she appears as Pocahontas, with fishnet stockings and
her hair in braids. Participation in karaoke is mandatory.
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‘Silver Linings Playbook’ With Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro.
More about Silver Linings Playbook Film
Director : David O. Russell.
Producer : Bruce Cohen, Donna Gigliotti & Jonathan Gordon.
Writers : David O. Russell (screenplay), Matthew Quick (novel).
Stars : Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro.
Distributed : The Weinstein Company.
Release Date : Nov 21, 2012.Genre : Comedy, Drama.
Runtime : 122 minute.
“Silver Linings Playbook,” the exuberant new movie from David O. Russell,
does almost everything right. The story tracks the feverish, happy,
sad, absurdly funny ups and downs of a head case named Pat Solatano,
played by a surprisingly effective, intensely focused Bradley Cooper,
just as he returns to his parents’ home after eight months in a mental
institution. Pat had been put away for a scarily violent crime, but now,
having shed fat and the defense it offered him, and feeding on the
shiny philosophy of the title instead, he feels ready to tackle the
world. The world may not be ready.
What the world is — at least, as it’s personified by the family and
friends zigzagging through the movie fielding jokes, confessing fears
and tightly holding onto a man who nearly spun into the void — is
welcoming, accepting, loving. “Silver Linings Playbook” is an outright
comedy, but like Pat, it’s a bipolar one that swings between passionate
highs and intentionally painful lows. When Pat’s mother, Dolores (a
sensational Jacki Weaver), brings him home from the asylum— briefly
accompanied by his pal in kookiness, Danny (Chris Tucker) — her husband,
Pat Sr. (a moving Robert De Niro),
complains that she didn’t tell him about springing their son. Dolores,
her Kewpie Doll eyes darting with animal panic, responds the only way
any loving mother and wife could: “It’s all under control.”
‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’ With Shah Rukh Khan and Anushka Sharma.
More about Jab Tak Hai Jaan Film
Director : Yash Chopra.
Writers : Devika Bhagat (screenplay), Aditya Chopra (screenplay).
Stars : Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma.Genre : Drama, Romance.
Runtime : 176 minute.
Yash Chopra’s final film, “Jab Tak Hai Jaan”
(“Till My Last Breath”), raises the stakes on Bollywood romance to
potentially explosive levels. The superstar Shah Rukh Khan plays Samar,
an expert bomb defuser who hides behind sunglasses and nerves of steel
in India, where he has fled after Meera (Katrina Kaif) breaks his heart
in London.
How his past romance all went down is explained through a prolonged
flashback involving amnesia, pacts with God, a hit and run, and a
percussive warehouse-party dance number. Along the way there are
sideline gigs as a busker, a fishmonger and a waiter. Once the film
catches us up, a fresh complication arises when a sassy young intern
from a TV show, Akira (Anushka Sharma), gets hooked on Samar while
shooting a documentary on his work.
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‘Anna Karenina’ With Keira Knightley and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
More about Anna Karenina Film
Director : Joe Wright.
Producer : Tim Bevan.
Writers : Tom Stoppard (screenplay), Leo Tolstoy (novel).
Stars : Keira Knightley, Jude Law and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Distributed : Focus Features.
Release Date : Nov 9, 2012.Genre : Drama.
Runtime : 130 minute.
Bad literary adaptations are all alike, but every successful literary
adaptation succeeds in its own way. The bad ones — or let’s just say the
average ones, to spare the feelings of hard-working wig makers and
dialect coaches — are undone by humility, by anxious obeisance to the
cultural prestige of literature. The good ones succeed through hubris,
through the arrogant assumption that a great novel is not a sacred
artifact but rather a lump of interesting material to be shaped
according to the filmmaker’s will.
The British director Joe Wright
has seemed to me — up to now — to belong to the dreary party of
humility. His screen versions of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” and
Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” are not terrible, just cautious and
responsible. For all their technical polish and the admirable discipline
of their casts, those films remain trapped in literariness. Instead of
strong, risky interpretations, they offer crib notes and the pale
flattery of imitation. The proof of their mediocrity is that admirers of
Austen or Mr. McEwan will find no reason for complaint.
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‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2’ With Kristen Stewart and Taylor Lautner.
More about The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 Film
Director : Bill Condon.
Producer : Stephenie Meyer, Wyck Godfrey & Karen Rosenfelt.
Writers : Melissa Rosenberg (screenplay), Stephenie Meyer (novel).
Stars : Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner.
Release Date : Nov 16, 2012.
Distributed : Summit Entertainment.Genre : Adventure, Drama, Fantasy, Romance.
Runtime : 115 minute.
Heads pop like Champagne corks in “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn —
Part 2,” the final chapter in the megamillion-dollar series about love,
war and franchise immortality. And why not? Even with the lavish blood
bath that slathers this movie red and pops those tops, these are joyous
times for Bella (Kristen Stewart),
who has risen revived, restyled and stone-cold dead after dropping a
new addition to the Cullen family, those veritable vegan vampires who
snack on woodland creatures instead of humans. After Bella nearly died
during pregnancy in the last movie, her undead husband, Edward (Robert Pattinson), saved her by piercing her neck, thus at long last making a vampire out of her.
Now, with newborn Renesmee, baby makes three. Played by what look like
digitally altered tots and an actual flesh-and-blood girl (Mackenzie
Foy), Renesmee is the nominal centerpiece for the final movie and its
reason for being. As half-human, half-vampire, and conceived while Bella
was still breathing, Renesmee turns out to be an instant problem child.
Not only does she look as creepy as the baby Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,”
she’s sprouting as fast as a magical beanstalk and, worse yet, has
attracted the attention of the Volturi, a vampire coven in Italy with
papal-like authority. Led by Aro (a fabulous, flamboyant Michael Sheen),
the Volturi come to believe that Renesmee is an “immortal child” whose
milk teeth will instigate a large-scale calamity.
Director : Sean Baker.
Writers : Sean Baker, Chris Bergoch.
Stars : Dree Hemingway, Besedka Johnson and James Ransone.Genre : Drama.
Runtime : 103 minute.
The bright sun that blasts through “Starlet,”
a thrillingly, unexpectedly good American movie about love and a moral
awakening, bathes everything in a radiant light, even the small houses
with thirsty lawns and dusty cars. This isn’t nowhere, but it’s right
next door — in that part of Southern California known as the San
Fernando Valley, more commonly called the Valley. A seemingly endless
stretch of subdivisions and McMansions, the Valley lies far below the
rarefied heights of Mulholland Drive, that glamorous crest that helps
divide the Los Angeles area into distinct swaths, economic realities,
lifestyle choices and states of mind.
It’s there that a 21-year-old actress who sometimes goes by Jane and sometimes Tess (Dree Hemingway)
lives with her Chihuahua and two conspicuously less intelligent human
roommates in an apartment building so anonymous it might as well be a
motel. She leads a luxuriously drifty existence, or so it seems, with an
open suitcase on her bedroom floor, its contents chaotically
half-disgorged, and no apparent job or prospects. If she’s worried, she
doesn’t look it. As she drives around, she seems oblivious to the effect
she can have on others, insulated by those natural armaments called
beauty and youth. When she smiles, she distills a quality that Henry
James evoked in describing Daisy Miller and her “inscrutable combination
of audacity and innocence.”
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Director : Todd Rohal.
Writer : Todd Rohal (screenplay).
Stars : Patton Oswalt, Johnny Knoxville and Rob Riggle.Genre : Comedy.
Runtime : 79 minute.
If the Boy Scouts offered a merit badge for inept filmmaking, Todd Rohal would certainly earn it with “Nature Calls,” an unwatchably bad movie about a camping trip gone haywire.
Patton Oswalt
plays Randy, a Scout leader who is determined to give his aged, frail
father, the founder of the troop, one last trip to the wilderness,
though none of the boys want to go. Kirk (Johnny Knoxville), Randy’s
brother, is also opposed to the outing, but somehow Randy gets the
youngsters out into the woods anyway.
ToviewWatch Live Nature Callspleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
‘Dangerous Liaisons’ With Cecilia Cheung and Ziyi Zhang.
More about Dangerous Liaisons Film
Director : Jin-ho Hur.
Writers : Choderlos de Laclos (novel), Geling Yan (screenplay).
Stars : Cecilia Cheung, Dong-gun Jang and Ziyi Zhang.Genre : Drama, Mystery, Romance.
Runtime : 110 minute.
The story and its players look different in the latest screen iteration of “Dangerous Liaisons,”
but the venomous passions remain repellently, seductively familiar.
Bankrolled by Chinese money and directed by a South Korean filmmaker,
Jin-ho Hur, this Chinese-language version of the 18th-century French
novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos opens in Shanghai in 1931, when the
city was known as the Paris of the Orient. (Now it’s just the center of
the world.) That year a fighting-trim Mao Zedong helped create the
Chinese Soviet Republic, and Japan invaded the Chinese province of
Manchuria, setting up a puppet government. The second Sino-Japanese war
was six years away.
Geopolitical tensions simmer at the outermost edges of “Dangerous
Liaisons,” which mostly unfolds as a divertingly lush tear-stained
melodrama. Written by Yan Geling, it follows the overall streamlined
contours and devious intrigues familiar from Stephen Frears’s 1988 film
of the Christopher Hampton stage adaptation. Once again a suave rake,
Xie Yifan (Jang Dong-gun, wearing a Clark Gable smirk and ’stache),
spends his nights busily bedding the local talent and his days sharing
gossip with a female counterpart, Mo Jieyu (Cecilia Cheung). They are
effectively the Shanghai match of Laclos’s Vicomte de Valmont and
Marquise de Merteuil, the twinned vipers who, while nestled in the bosom
of the city’s high society, conspire to seduce, conquer and destroy
their prey.
ToviewWatch Live Dangerous Liaisonspleaseclick onthe linkbelowthismovietriler.
‘A Royal Affair’ With Alicia Vikander and Mikkel Boe Folsgaard.
More about A Royal Affair Film
Director : Nikolaj Arcel.
Producer : Sisse Graum Jørgensen, Louise Vesth, Rasmus Videbæk.
Writers : Bodil Steensen-Leth (novel), Rasmus Heisterberg (screenplay).
Stars : Alicia Vikander, Mads Mikkelsen and Mikkel Boe Følsgaard.
Distributed : Magnolia Pictures.
Release Date : Feb 16, 2012.Genre : Drama, History, Romance.
Runtime : 137 minute.
Johann Friedrich Struensee,
a German-born 18th-century physician and martyr for liberty, is well
known to schoolchildren in Denmark. Analogies are imperfect this
critic’s mastery of Danish history even more so but Struensee, who
died a few years before the start of the American Revolution, might be
compared to Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. Like other eminent
figures of the Age of Reason he was both a politician and a man of
science, a philosopher and what we might nowadays call a player.
Lover, fighter, thinker and schemer that is the portrait that emerges in “A Royal Affair,”
an Advanced Placement bodice-ripper directed by Nikolaj Arcel.
Struensee, played with an intriguing blend of dash and gloom by Mads
Mikkelsen, is depicted with a reverence touched by slightly envious
admiration. This guy not only reformed the Danish legal code and pushed a
backward nation toward the light of modernity. He also slept with the
queen!
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Director : Rick Alverson.
Producer : Brent Kunkle, Mike S. Ryan.
Writers : Robert Donne, Rick Alverson.
Stars : Tim Heidecker, Eric Wareheim and James Murphy.
Distributed : Tribeca Film.
Release Date : Jan 21, 2012.Genre : Drama.
Runtime : 90 minute.
Swanson, the lump of humanity at the center of “The Comedy,”
has money and privilege, but no class. As he waits for his rich father
to die, Swanson (Tim Heidecker) spends his days hanging out with his
pals, drinking, riding his bike, working at menial jobs more out of
boredom than economic necessity and luring women back to the sailboat
he keeps moored in the waters off New York City. What appeals to these
women? The film does not bother to say, or even to give them names.
Directed by Rick Alverson, from a script he wrote with Robert Donne and Colm O’Leary, “The Comedy”
is, with respect to its main character and principal conceit, an
entirely conventional movie. The underachieving, overweight man-child is
a stock figure in Hollywood comedies, and making the protagonist a
thoroughly unpleasant person has become a staple of independent cinema.
Mr. Alverson and Mr. Heidecker should be congratulated, I guess, for
rigorously refusing to make Swanson the least bit sympathetic.
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Director : Steven Spielberg.
Producer : Steven Spielberg & Kathleen Kennedy.
Writers : Tony Kushner (screenplay), Doris Kearns Goodwin (book) (in part).
Stars : Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field and David Strathairn.
Distributed : Touchston Pictures.
Release Date : Nov 9, 2012.
Genre : Biography, Drama, History, War.
Runtime : 150 minute.
It is something of a paradox that American movies a great democratic
art form, if ever there was one have not done a very good job of
representing American democracy. Make-believe movie presidents are
usually square-jawed action heroes, stoical Solons or ineffectual
eggheads, blander and more generically appealing than their complicated
real-life counterparts, who tend to be treated deferentially or ignored
entirely unless they are named Richard Nixon.
The legislative process the linchpin of
our system of checks and balances is often treated with lofty contempt
masquerading as populist indignation, an attitude typified by the
aw-shucks antipolitics of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”
Hollywood dreams of consensus, of happy endings and box office unity,
but democratic government can present an interminable tale of gridlock,
compromise and division. The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption
of the Republic in action have all too rarely made it onto the big
screen.
There are exceptions, of course, and one of them is Steven Spielberg’s splendid “Lincoln,”
which is, strictly speaking, about a president trying to scare up votes
to get a bill passed in Congress. It is of course about a lot more than
that, but let’s stick to the basics for now. To say that this is among
the finest films ever made about American politics may be to
congratulate it for clearing a fairly low bar. Some of the movie’s
virtues are, at first glance, modest ones, like those of its hero, who
is pleased to present himself as a simple backwoods lawyer, even as his
folksy mannerisms mask a formidable and cunning political mind.
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Director : Sam Mendes.
Producer : Barbara Broccoli & Michael G. Wilson.
Writers : Neal Purvis, Robert Wade.
Stars : Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem and Naomie Harris.
Distributed : Columbia Pictures.
Release Date : Nov 9, 2012.Genre : Action, Adventure, Crime, Thriller.
Runtime : 143 minute.
When James Bond dashed into Buckingham Palace in July to pick up Queen Elizabeth so they could parachute into the Olympic opening ceremony,
it was tough to picture what he could do for an encore. Zip line into
the next European summit meeting with Angela Merkel tucked under his
arm? Wrestle nude on the frozen banks of the Volga with Vladimir Putin? Turning Britain’s royal octogenarian into a Bond girl
was a stroke of cross-marketing genius that profited queen and country
both, while also encapsulating the appeal of the 007 brand in the age of
aerial drones.
It’s the human factor, to borrow somewhat perversely a phrase from Graham Greene, who worked for Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6. In his novel “The Human Factor,”
about a double agent, Greene sought, he said, to portray the British
secret service unromantically, with “men going daily to their office to
earn their pensions.” Bond is wearing a silver-gray suit when he powers
into “Skyfall,”
the latest 007 escapade, but it isn’t cut for office work. The suit is
seductively tight, for starters, and moves like a second skin when
Daniel Craig in his third stint as Bond races through an atavistic
opener that with bullets buzzing and M (Judi Dench) whispering orders
in his ear puts him back on mortal, yet recognizably Bondian, ground.
And just in time too, given that he looked
as if he were on the Bataan Death March in his last film, “Quantum of Solace.” Directed by a surprisingly well-equipped Sam Mendes, “Skyfall” is, in every way, a superior follow-up to “Casino Royale,”
the 2006 reboot that introduced Mr. Craig as Bond. “Skyfall” even plays
like something of a franchise rethink, partly because it brings in new
faces and implies that Bond, like Jason Bourne,
needed to be reborn. The tone is again playful and the stakes feel
serious if not punishingly so. This is a Bond who, after vaulting into a
moving train car, pauses to adjust a shirt cuff, a gesture that eases
the scene’s momentum without putting the brakes on it.
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Director : Michael Brown.
Writers : Michael Brown , Scott McElroy.
Stars : Steve Baskis, Dan Sidles and Katherine Ragazzino.Genre : Documentary.
Runtime : 92 minute.
The scenery is breathtaking and the tone resolutely jaunty, but “High Ground,” which treks alongside 11 wounded United States veterans (and one bereft mother) to the top of a Himalayan mountain, leaves an inescapably poignant trace.
This has less to do with the wounds
themselves both visible and veiled than with the astonishingly
candid confessions of their bearers, hammered home all too often by
careening combat footage. Whether displaying suck it up stoicism or
hanging by a thread fragility, these diverse men and women vividly
convey the profound personal transformations their deployment has
wrought. Scaling a 20,000 foot peak in Nepal
might offer healing for some and for others an opportunity to test
mobility and stamina; for everyone it’s an apt analogy for the challenge
of readjusting to civilian life.
Capturing this inaugural expedition of a program called Soldiers to Summits, the director, Michael Brown (a renowned mountaineer),
digs below the adventure itself to reveal the gaping holes in our
veteran care. Doing so, he translates a collage of experiences some
desperate, some hopeful, all tragic into a first person commentary on
the malign reverberations of war.
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