Posts for 'Movie Previews' Category

Spy thriller "The American" rocketed to the top of the North American box office to beat out crime action flick "Takers," preliminary figures showed Sunday.

The debut weekend for George Clooney's atmospheric thriller, hailed by critics as a visually captivating but restrained departure for the Hollywood star, took in 12.3 million dollars in US and Canadian theaters this weekend, according to figures from industry tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Last week's winner "Takers," starring Hayden Christensen, Idris Elba and singers Chris Brown and T.I., earned 11.5 million dollars and fell to second place in its second week of release.

In third position was "Machete," mixing violence with a campy tribute to 1970s exploitation movies from directors Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis for an opening weekend take of 11.3 million dollars. Fourth place went to the gruesome documentary-style horror movie "The Last Exorcism," which fell back from its competitive runner-up spot last weekend to take 7.6 million dollars.

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The American: Movie Review: Hidden from critics until just before its release, the dirty secret about "The American" turns out to be that it's an "art film." Heavens, no! Director Anton Corbijn has crafted a quiet, haunting European thriller, drained of emotion and moving to its own deliberate pace.

It's the second film from Corbijn, a famed photographer and music video director who's closely associated with the bands Depeche Mode and Joy Division (among others). His first film, "Control," was a beautiful, austere black-and-white biopic of Joy Division's Ian Curtis.

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There's a character in "Sex and the City 2" named Erin. She's Irish. She prefers not to wear a brassiere. Several scenes exhibit her brogue and her breasts, eventually leading to a one-liner where she's dubbed "Erin Go Braless."This so-called joke is the movie in microcosm: naughty, desperate, indulgent, groan-worthy, working too hard and too long for a crummy joke. Once an exciting and bubbly HBO series known for its spicy dialogue and progressive depiction of modern urban women, "Sex" now resorts to setting up and executing flaccid puns more worthy of Bazooka Joe than a major summer cineplex tentpole.

You'd think all the lousy double-entendres would comprise most of "Sex and the City 2's" obscenity, but no. Writer/director Michael Patrick King drenches the production in vile opulence, from the absurdly lush, exotic locations to the kajillion costume changes -- the fashionista franchise's signature -- to Liza Minnelli's ironic cameo, during which she sings Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)." Too. Much.

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Kites was specifically made to appeal to Western sensibilities it’s not the first Bollywood film to try to crossover, but it is the first to succeed at it, and it does so while remaining true to the essence of Hindi cinema. Kites looks like an American film, but it feels like an Indian one.

It’s not the best Bollywood movie—not by a long shot—but by stripping itself of the typical trappings of Hindi films (and making itself stylistically familiar to Westerners), it reveals the heart of Bollywood—a beating, bleeding operatic heart. Hindi cinema is ultimately not about language or culture or musical numbers; it’s about exalted melodrama that draws you in despite yourself and affects you with life’s corniness and agony.

The story is set in Las Vegas; the actors speak a combination of Hindi, English, and Spanish; there is only one dance scene; and the plot follows a single sequence of events—all of which help make the film accessible to non-Indian audiences. Director Anurag Basu was the perfect choice for this project as his style naturally lends itself to the objective. Had his previous film, Life in a…Metro (2007), been marketed abroad as aggressively as Kites has been, it would have garnered the same critical praise in the U.S that his latest film has. Cinematographer Ayananka Bose produces sharp, gorgeous shots of the glitz of Las Vegas, the desolation of the desert, and the beauty of the leads, Indian superstar Hrithik Roshan and Mexican actress Barbara Mori.

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The inner demons of unhappiness, anger, competitiveness, sexual insecurity, and fear that eat the soul of an outwardly successful professional comedian are of keen interest to other comedians, their mothers, their shrinks, and maybe even their mothers' shrinks.

It's 
 the rest of us who are left out of Funny People, Judd Apatow's furiously anguished — and,
 at 145 unshaped minutes, quantifiably endless — tragi-comedy about a sad showbiz clown and his ilk.

Of course, characters and dramas built around the anger that fuels the funny constitute a venerable black-humor subgenre: W.C. Fields reveled in the muck, and the jolting movies The King of Comedy and The Entertainer made art out of the emotional contradictions of professional comics. But Funny People is a less successful stab at explaining jerks who make jokes. The movie, deeply personal to its maker, is too self-
absorbed to convey effectively the emotional complexity that Apatow has in mind. The message that comes across is: We're all screwed, and then we die. Ba-DUM.

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Horror films rarely are screened for critics -- let alone get positive reviews from them. Orphan is an exception. No less a critic than Roger Ebert has awarded the film 3 1/2 stars. He calls the film "shamelessly effective" -- shameless, apparently, because it concerns a child -- benign on the surface, but with evil powers lurking below.

Ebert concedes that the movie "would probably have offended" his late television colleague Gene Siskel, "who had a thing about movies exploiting children in danger." Yet he concludes "You want a good horror film about a child from hell? You got one." Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle praises the film for providing "everything you might expect in a psycho-child thriller, but with such excess and exuberance that it still has the power to surprise."

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When you think of summer, you think of pools and beaches, days filled with children playing outdoors, and, of course, summertime is a terrific time to catch the latest box office hit or catch up on the DVD list of movies you missed out on last year. But, which movies are really the most appropriate for your child? The MPAA ratings offer a basic guideline.

From there, asking friends and family for recommendations is a means for getting movie feedback. But, each child is different. Getting both subjective and objective movie reviews that cover every movie topic from violence to sexuality and even some reviews that are based on a Christian-specific viewpoint can offer you that final piece of advice to gauge which movies are most appropriate for your child.

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Played out on a vast sometimes overcrowded canvas, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (Warner Bros.) is a richly textured adventure narrative in which good and evil are clearly delineated, but characters present a range of moral shading.

As they did in the franchise's earlier films, magical elements in this sixth adaptation of J.K. Rowling's hugely popular fantasy novel series serve merely as props in a study of loyalty, friendship and the varied human responses to temptation. Unlike the moral lessons on display, these spells and potions are not intended to have any more application to real life than the flying monkeys in "The Wizard of Oz."

Instead, the basis of the story continues to be the struggle between a now-teenage Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and the forces of darkness known as the Death Eaters whose leader, Lord Voldemort, murdered Harry's parents while he was still an infant.

"The Ugly Truth" (Columbia/Relativity) is an odd-couple romantic comedy marred by a formulaic plot and a relentless barrage of raunchy humor. While the wayward proceedings may have been intended to register as provocative, they only succeed in being tiresome.In large part, that's because of the boorishness of protagonist Mike Chadway (Gerard Butler). The shock-jock host of the titular cable TV show, Mike is a crude chauvinist who proclaims that all men are sex-obsessed animals, and that women need to accept this "ugly truth" if they're going to have any hope of a successful relationship.

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Traffic delays may occur today as TVA moves another large transformer to the Rutherford substation site in Rockvale.The second of four transformers will be transported by a specially equipped trailer with more than 60 tires from the rail yard in Murfreesboro to the substation site. The 300-ton oversize-trailer and transformer will leave the rail yard about 9 a.m. and is expected to take about seven hours to complete the 19-mile route.

Although TVA and its contractors will try to minimize disruptions as much as possible, temporary traffic delays will occur along the route. The route has been coordinated with local utilities and state, county and local officials.

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