Creditable retelling of an early chapter in Texas history ("As goes the Alamo, so goes Texas"), not as cumbersome as the John Wayne version of 1960, perhaps even a little cursory. Director and co-screenwriter John Lee Hancock humanizes the central figures -- Crockett, Bowie, Travis, Houston, though not the ogre-ish …
The sight of Annabelle belted in the back seat of the Warren’s car as she’s chauffeured home to the relative safety of the family’s prized collection of demon memorabilia opened the show with a grin. In no time, the smile turned upside down. Here’s a horror sequel that wants to …
The sight of Annabelle belted in the back seat of the Warren’s car as she’s chauffeured home to the relative safety of the family’s prized collection of demon memorabilia opened the show with a grin. In no time, the smile turned upside down. Here’s a horror sequel that wants to …
Last year’s King Arthur movie may have flopped, but director James Wan — whose horror beginnings (Saw, Insidious, The Conjuring) show up in ways both annoying (frequent use of explosion-as-jump-scare) and delightful (there’s a reason H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Dunwich Horror makes a foreground appearance early on) — seems to …
The F-grade. Smug quartet of rogue commandos on a noisy, chaotic, impossible mission to — besides recover some Ben Franklin engraving plates from Baghdad — clear their records and start a film franchise. Based on the Eighties TV series. With Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, Quinton “Rampage” Jackson, Jessica …
In burying her mother, small town pharmacist and 40-year-old spinster Ave Maria Mulligan (Ashley Judd), unearths a scandalous family secret. The brief documentary history of the titular Virginia town that opens novelist and first-time director Adriana Trigiani’s undoubting romantic comedy suggested something more than another serving of Fried Green Magnolias. …
In the decades since Linda Blair first hocked up a pea-soup facial, Hollywood xerographers have found in demonic possession a perennial cash absorber. Director James Wan (Saw, Insidious) stylishly resists the easy temptation of schlock-shocks and CGI as a means of supplanting storytelling. For its its first hour, this fact-based …
What a difference acting makes. At the outset of this sequel to 2013’s surprise horror hit about a Catholic couple who do scout work for the Church to determine where supernatural intervention is required, wife Lorraine Warren (Vera Farmiga) has a vision of a demon who has it in for …
It’s beginning to feel a lot like television. Rather than spend 30 minutes each week watching Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) solve real-life mysteries on a fictional cable show (Curse Breakers?), New Line drops semi-annual theatrical installments from the seemingly limitless Conjuring universe. It’s 1981, and …
It’s beginning to feel a lot like television. Rather than spend 30 minutes each week watching Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) solve real-life mysteries on a fictional cable show (Curse Breakers?), New Line drops semi-annual theatrical installments from the seemingly limitless Conjuring universe. It’s 1981, and …
Thonggrrrl14 makes a chat-room date with Lensman319, which is to say a fourteen-year-old, pixie-haired schoolgirl and a professional photographer eighteen years her senior, but predator becomes prey in this simple-minded, long-drawn-out ritual of revenge, essentially a two-character piece, an interminable tennis volley of his-and-hers faces, grueling, fatiguing, suffocating. With Patrick …
The horror franchise’s original cast returns for the final chapter of the Lambert family’s terrifying saga. To put their demons to rest once and for all, Josh (Patrick Wilson, who also directs) and a college-aged Dalton (Ty Simpkins) must go deeper into The Further than ever before, facing their family’s …
Neil LaBute’s neighbor-from-hell thriller, no more than mildly provocative by his toughest standards (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, et al.), details the escalating ill will between a newly arrived interracial couple (Patrick Wilson, Kerry Washington) and the long-ensconced, widowed black policeman next door (Samuel L. Jackson), …
Todd Field's sophomore directing effort, following up his quietly sensationalized In the Bedroom, is less quietly sensationalized, in other words more blaringly sensationalized, and truly more sophomoric. The adaptation of a Tom Perrotta novel, complete with a snooty third-person-omniscient (i.e., know-it-all) narrator, undoubtedly tells us less about the malaise of …
All of the tropes are in order starting with a disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) wrongfully blamed for a co-worker’s death who is unable to confront this dark moment from his past. Mother Earth is next placed on a collision course with another planet, in this case the moon hurtling out …