MetroPulse Stories: Movies

Does the Audience Really Get the Satirical Thriller 'The Purge'?

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:15:00 -0000

Sometimes the reaction to a movie is more interesting than the movie itself. Such is the case with The Purge, the futuristic home-invasion tale from writer/director James DeMonaco, which set a record last weekend when it grossed $36.4 million—a bigger opening than any other original, R-rated horror film to date.

Magic Thriller 'Now You See Me': A Con Job, But a Fun One

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:56:00 -0000

Now You See Me is supposed to leave us thinking about the many parallels between movies and stage magic. We go into both with a willingness to be tricked—we know it’s all an illusion, but we’re partners in the artifice.

'Fast and Furious 6': The Best Bad Movie of the Summer

Wed, 29 May 2013 14:48:00 -0000

Having struck an uneasy truce with Dwayne Johnson’s caricatured super-spook at the end of Five, the F&F gang are back on alert when Johnson finds himself up against an international gang of auto-savvy thieves hell-bent on constructing some sort of military communications disruptor—and he knows just the team to take them on!

Baz Luhrmann’s 'Great Gatsby': All Spectacle, No Heart

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:48:00 -0000

Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby has quite a bit going for it: an epic soundtrack; eye-popping art direction; a titanic-sized (or Titanic-sized) budget, courtesy of co-producer Jay-Z; a number of radiant performances; and source material from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great American Novel. It also kinda sucks.

Studio Ghibli’s Torch Is Not Quite Passed Yet With 'From Up on Poppy Hill'

coury@metropulse.com (Coury Turczyn) — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:35:00 -0000

From Up on Poppy Hill is a fine film. But it’s not a great one.

Michael Bay Reveals Unexpected Self-Referential Wit in Action Satire 'Pain & Gain'

Wed, 01 May 2013 14:34:00 -0000

Some people have never been particularly friendly to the Transformers director; according to Rotten Tomatoes, his 1996 prison-break adventure The Rock is the only Bay film to inspire so much as toleration from critics, while serious film fans deride his rapid, nearly incomprehensible cutting as the depths of taste. But if we let fair criticisms and commercial savvy drown each other out, what remains of Michael Bay isn’t some empty-headed technician with a hard-on for explosions—it’s a filmmaker who’s conquered the biggest, dumbest beast in Hollywood, and now practices the blockbuster as a style unto itself.

'Oblivion' Reminds Us What Makes Sci-Fi Great

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:50:00 -0000

Oblivion is just as interesting for what it might mean for sci-fi fans as for what it actually is. It gives us everything we’d expect from a movie that comes with a reported $100 million price tag, but it’s also a throwback to the thoughtful science fiction of the 1960s and ’70s.

Repeat Offender Rob Zombie Manages to Attain Stylishness with 'The Lords of Salem'

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 14:09:00 -0000

Shock-rocker Rob Zombie’s fifth feature, The Lords of Salem, is his most accomplished movie so far, and has something none of his previous films could claim: a sense of fun.

Fede Alvarez’s Update of 'The Evil Dead' Lacks the Original’s Lively Humor

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 13:28:00 -0000

The Evil Dead cries out for revisiting—on the surface, anyway. Originally shot for less than $100,000 at a cabin just outside of Morristown, Sam Raimi’s debut is a textbook on (mostly) transcended limitations.

Harmony Korine’s College Bacchanalia 'Spring Breakers' Turns Into a Disturbing Fever Dream

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:30:00 -0000

Spring Breakers is still a nihilistic (though frequently hilarious) film about young people who suffer from a dangerous disconnect between their actions and the consequences they might have, but this is an altogether more accomplished and more accessible work than anything Harmony Korine has attempted so far.

'The ABCs of Death' Surveys Contemporary Horror With Mixed Results

everettm@metropulse.com (Matthew Everett) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:44:00 -0000

The ABCs of Death, which the Knoxville Horror Film Festival is screening this weekend, collects 26 short films—one for each letter of the alphabet—by 26 acclaimed directors from around the world, most of them under 40.

Sam Raimi's 'Oz the Great and Powerful' Pays Off in Unexpected Ways

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:53:00 -0000

Raimi’s prequel is a fun (if overinflated) movie that works beautifully as a guided tour through a vividly rendered Oz, and you couldn’t ask for a better—or more demented—tour guide.

The Long-Delayed 'Jack the Giant Slayer' Is a Giant Disappointment

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:29:00 -0000

It didn’t seem too much to ask that Bryan Singer’s long- and little-awaited Jack the Giant Slayer be a wall-to-wall disaster, the sort of bomb that brings this regrettable recent string of fairy-tale reboots to an end.

Recession Horror Hits a New Low With 'Dark Skies'

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:00:00 -0000

The fact that the boogeymen in Dark Skies are aliens and not ghosts or the demons who lurk about in both of the aforementioned films is irrelevant; Dark Skies is perhaps the most explicit (and explicitly derivative) mile marker of the new, haunted-family horror we’ve seen so far.

Star-Studded Mob Comedy 'Stand Up Guys' Loses Its Footing

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:57:00 -0000

Rarely have the talents of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, and Alan Arkin been as crassly misused as they are in Stand Up Guys.

Michael Haneke’s Harrowing 'Amour' Traces the End of a Storybook Romance

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:24:00 -0000

Beaming brides and welling grooms say them thousands of times every day, and mean them, but they are heavy words indeed: “Till death do us part.”

Zombie Rom-Com 'Warm Bodies' Has No Pulse

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:49:00 -0000

It took me an embarrassingly long time to key into the fact that Warm Bodies is essentially just an inevitable variation on the post-Twilight girl-loves-monster formula.

Jacques Audiard’s 'Rust and Bone' Doesn’t Reveal Much About Its Characters

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 16:23:00 -0000

Really, Jacques Adiard’s emotionally devastating Rust and Bone is two films in one. At its core, it’s an unlikely love story between two flawed, broken, battered people, pulled together by the same animalistic instincts that eventually tear them apart. Then there’s the film that surrounds that film, an artful hodgepodge of visual symbolism and cinematic fluff.

Ah-nold Schwarzenegger Returns to Action in 'The Last Stand'

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:11:00 -0000

Few movies have ever been as carefully calculated to appeal to red-state America as The Last Stand, a film that, taken at face value, would have NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre’s eyes rolling back in his head from the sheer, orgiastic ecstasy of it all.

'Zero Dark Thirty' Functions as Grown-Up Action Movie and as a Meditation on the War on Terror

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:29:00 -0000

Kathryn Bigelow’s mastery turns a largely spying-free spy movie into one of the best films of 2012.