2014

Philip Seymour Hoffman anchors this John le Carré adaptation and makes it compelling, even when the film’s rambling tendencies threaten to derail it.

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Two darkly comic indie films make their way to Blu-ray from IFC and Drafthouse Films, one steeped in bizarre magical realism and the other a downward spiral in a blue-collar neighborhood.

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Jackpot‘s visually a lot of fun to watch. You know just by looking at the cover of it that it’s got to be a dark comedy of some form, and it delivers on that note spectacularly.

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[Minor Rock Fist Up] Michael Fassbender plays the titular misfit in Frank, the debut from director Lenny Abrahamson and writers Jon Ronson and Peter Straughan. Frank follows a young wannabe musician named Jon (played by Domhnall Gleeson) who desperately wants to escape his sleepy life for stardom and adoration. As luck would have it, he stumbles upon a […]

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Happy Christmas, a product of the low-budget, realism-oriented mumblecore movement, is anything but. It’s a small, thoughtful comedy that’s more concerned with believable characters and relationships than it is with highly-scripted dialogue or memorable set pieces.

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If I Stay follows Mia Hall (Chloë Grace Moretz), a cellist prodigy as she faces the biggest decision of her teenage life, does she stay with punk rock family and boyfriend in Portland or head east to attend school at the esteemed Juilliard.

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The Giver is the quiet insightful kid at the party, who says something hilarious under their breath, but within earshot of a louder more boisterous partygoer. The loud person shouts the hilarious observation, and gets all of the credit, leaving a stalwart few to point out that, actually, someone else said it first.

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Brendan Gleeson stars in a dark comedy/mystery/character actors’ dream about a priest given a week to live before a stranger plans to kill him.

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Can’t we just blow up a helicopter like the old days anymore? Do we have to replace it with half-rendered computer effects? Rambo would not be proud.

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Magic in the Moonlight is not terrible, but it’s far from Woody Allen‘s best. This is Allen playing it safe, with material that’s familiar both in the setting, and the theme.

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What do you get when you combine the convoluted plot of a movie you’ve probably already seen with one of the most hilariously enigmatic actors of our time? If you guessed Rage out August 12th on DVD and Blu-Ray starring Hollywood-oddity Nicolas Cage, you probably guessed right.

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Some movies this summer and every summer manage to rise above some silly source material to be something that is genuinely compelling or at the very least interesting. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is not one of them.

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Writer/director Andrew Levitas delivers an inconsistent story of a young man dealing with his father’s decision to give up his struggle with cancer.

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The bottom line is that Guardians of the Galaxy is a fun and exciting summer movie, that has better characters, and a more thoughtful storyline than any blockbuster for at least 5 years.

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Because Richard Linklater posits questions instead of answering them in his film Boyhood, he can show us a boy growing up and make us think that perhaps everyone goes through similar experiences.

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