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 …
Admittedly, yours truly is not the most informed critical voice to heed when it comes to assessing stodgy British costume dramas. (I tend to side with Francois Truffaut, who once referred to "British cinema" as an oxymoron.) Still, soon after the bits of choreographed slapstick at the film's opening, it …
Urban Outfitters plays at The Rialto, while down the street at the Orpheum, an audience is packed to the rafters, watching The Ape of God, starring Henry McHenry (Adam Driver), an incendiarily disruptive stand-up comic/performance artist who makes Nick Cannon look like Andy Kaufman. (The biggest laugh from his set …
A cast that can neither sing nor dance, a director who three times breaks the 180-degree rule (and that’s just in the opening credits!), and musical numbers butted together to make way for untold minutes of vanilla babble position this wretched remake of the almost-as-appalling John Huston paycheck somewhere between …
Never before has a “Shakespearean” movie been this lousy. Rafe Spall plays the bard as a bumpkin, virtually illiterate, but the dim actors think he created the great plays scripted in secret by the haughty snob Edward, 17th Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans, desperate to hold on to some dignity). …
The graduating class celebrated by making such drunken fools of themselves, the high school board contemplated enacting a zero-alcohol policy. Unfortunately, the ban wouldn’t pertain to four faculty members with a theory they’re looking to put to the test: if people are indeed born with a blood alcohol content that’s …
If ever a filmmaker’s heart was in the right place, it’s local documentarian Brian Jenkins’s. John Witek, Jenkins’s uncle, was a student at the University of Virginia when he joined Martin Luther King’s march on Selma. Alas, the road to insightful documentary filmmaking is not paved with good intentions. But …
82-year-old Claude Lorius was the first scientist to alert the world to the perils of global warming. His one regret in life is that history has proved him right. A biographical, cinematic corollary of Al Gore’s canned Learning Annex lecture, Luc Jacquet’s Antarctica condenses 22 polar missions — all told, …
The trailer and butterfly-bound poster art (borrowed from The Silence of the Lambs) may convince audiences there’s horror ahead. And there is, just not the kind inspired by the empty-headed, atrocity-inducing monsters to which audiences have grown accustomed. On their best days, Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers are no match …
With more than a tinge of regret besprinkling their voices, friends of the late Antonio Lopez reminisce in close-up about the promiscuous pre-AIDS 70s and how the influential fashion designer figured into the good old days before indiscriminate sex came with a death sentence attached. Lopez arrived on the scene …
West Hollywood, 1979. A carefree female impersonator (Alan Cumming) and a closeted D.A. (Garret Dillahunt) engage in a one night stand, and in no time they’re a couple immersed in a custody battle to adopt a 14-year-old (Isaac Leyva) with Down Syndrome. (The boy’s mother is serving time for drug …
By way of a review, Scott Marks presents the How to Make a PG-13 Horror Film Checklist: Spooky house, pre-credit flashback to Super8 footage, two attractive teenage-ish leads, a Kristen Stewart replica, paranormal security-cam footage, a first-time director manning the till, a plot that crumbles faster than a piece of …