Reviews

Damian Szifron’s extraordinarily fun and twisted movie Wild Tales, out on Blu-ray tomorrow, was nominated for a best foreign language film Oscar earlier this year.

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Jurassic World is a bad impression of a Spielberg film. It rips off all of the bombast, but manages to capture none of the likability of the first one, instead resorting to basic fan service and overt nods to the original. Maybe worst of all, Jurassic World is stupid.

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Sophie Barthes removes any focus on Charles in her retelling of Madame Bovary. In doing so she undermines many of the strengths of Gustav Flaubert’s novel.

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Chappie, out on Blu-ray now, may be a mess, but it has a strange kind of staying power, amidst all the madness.

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Red Army, out on Blu-ray now, runs parallel to the events that led to the fall of the Soviet Union and reiterates Communist ideals through the sport of hockey.

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Whether you are new to Brian Wilson’s story or you are looking for an excuse to pull out your Pet Sounds vinyl, Love & Mercy is a well-crafted ode to an inspirational figure, and an entertaining and well-acted film.

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Feig’s ability to breathe fresh air into a somewhat stale concept bodes well for his and Ms. McCarthy’s expected reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise, which might very well succeed if it is as sharp and creative with its writing and comedy set pieces as Spy is.

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BASE Jumping founder Carl Boenish was fearless, but Sunshine Superman makes the mistake of taking the emphasis away from Boenish’s exciting, envelope-pushing film work to tell a story that doesn’t celebrate his cinematic risk-taking or convey the excitement of his skydiving stunts.

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Currently playing at the Seattle International Film Festival, and riding high on the laurels won at Cannes and the Caesars (Adèle Haenel won Best Actress at both), Love at First Fight is a light, interesting, gorgeous, and ultimately successful take on the familiar rom-com standard.

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Currently playing at the Seattle International Film Festival, A Blast is anything but, and only hints at something potentially special beneath all the misshapen debris.

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Showing at SIFF 2015 now, the doc License to Operate examines the volunteer organizations that have formed in L.A. in an effort to curb violence and create lasting lines of communications between the neighborhoods and civic officials (police included).

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Dwayne Johnson stars in San Andreas, a disaster movie that’s too competent to be schlock, too dumb to be interesting and too concerned with spectacle to be entertaining.

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From the beginning, Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is a compromised film. Many of the choices to force in exposition and emotional depth undermine the strengths of the disaster film.

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In My Skinny Sister (Swedish: Min lilla syster), Swedish pre-teen Stella (Rebecka Josephson) is having a hard enough time navigating the minefield that is adolescence without the passive torment doled out by her big sister, Katja (Amy Deasismont).

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Set Fire to the Stars stars Elijah Wood as real-life poet John Brinnin, who in 1950 arranged the first American reading tour for the Welsh literary legend, Dylan Thomas (Celyn Jones).

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