May 2014

The heavy lifting in the character department is all done by Angelina Jolie because Maleficent has little more than a couple of thinly developed and somewhat jarring plot points to turn her from innocent faery to malevolent witch.

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Rookie director Jake Wilson has crafted a light, quirky, but always humorous movie about one woman’s adventures navigating the treacherous waters of a late-twenty-something N.Y.C. existence.

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Paul Wright’s debut feature ‘For Those in Peril’ taps into the ennui of community isolation, personal shame, and catastrophic loss without ever confronting the meaning of any of these issues for its characters or their world.

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A direct follow-up to 2009’s Dead Snow, director Tommy Wirkola is back with another take-no-prisoners examination of how bad it could get if not just zombies, but Nazi-zombies mucked about and started some shit.

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Currently playing at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, Gold is a rare treat. A feel-good movie about an exiled dad looking to reconnect with his family, this Irish flick finds a way to tickle all the right spots without squeezing the sappier portions too terribly much.

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While Lee’s Unforgiven reboot probably won’t have the same cultural and cinematic impact as Leone’s first spaghetti western, the Japanese remake of what is widely regarded as Clint Eastwood’s finest work is nothing less than breathtaking.

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Another report from SIFF 2014! A Patriotic Man: The year is 1980, and members of Finland’s national ski team are looking for any advantage so that they might medal at the Olympics in Lake Placid.

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Director Bryan Singer returns to the franchise that defined much of his career with X-Men: Days of Future Past, an ambitious blockbuster that attempts to unite the characters from the original X-Men trilogy with the 2011 movie X-Men: First Class. It’s a sizable undertaking, to be sure, and while Singer does manage to keep the […]

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Singer has a way of juggling an ensemble cast that includes almost 20 mutants that keeps X-Men: Days of Future Past on solid enough footing even when its multiple reality timeline bends and almost breaks.

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A clever mix of Harlan Ellison and Stephen King with just a dash of Poe-esque irony, Bradley King’s Time Lapse is a thrilling delight. The story of three friends who discover that their dead neighbor owned a camera that can take pictures of future events, the film pushes all the right buttons to elicit a tangible sense of excitement, curiosity, and foreboding dread.

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The movie’s focus is the period in Jimi Hendrix’s life between 1966 and 1967, when he was crafting the nuances of his unique sound: one that would explode into mainstream consciousness by the time 1968 dawned.

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Not only do the new 2K restoration of Ace in the Hole and new 4K restored digital transfer of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou look fantastic, but the films themselves seem timeless now.

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The challenge for “Godzilla” director Gareth Edwards was to utilize the big studio budget to respect the tenets of the kaiju film, take the premise dead seriously, and create some actual awe-inspiring cinematic moments. Considering the limitations of the genre, I’d say he more than succeeded.

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Seattle, WA – Once again, Scene-Stealers has sent its chief west coast film correspondent to cover the opening night festivities of the Seattle International Film Festival, and once again, your humble author just barely got out alive. Well, okay…actually, this year it really wasn’t all that bad. For those of you who have followed the […]

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This week, Trevan and Trey talk Godzilla, the giant lizard’s return to form. Their reviews cover the first half of the podcast before moving on to welcome Molly Garrett, Joseph Tuzzolino, Erin Kennedy and Cody Hunt, four students from the Kansas City Art Institute featured in tonight’s film exhibition at the Alamo Drafthouse. If you don’t […]

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