The plot of Nurse 3D is clearly spelled out in the beginning of the movie when a sluttily dressed woman named Abigail Russell seduces a married man at a bar, slices open his femoral artery and pushes him over a roof ledge while saucily confessing to the audience she does things like this to cleanse…
There’s not much more frustrating than a film that comes so close to being thought-provoking and perceptive, but chooses instead to focus on apathetic plights and easy solutions. The Monuments Men embodies this all too well, dangling fascinating questions just out of reach, all the while cycling through a series of genre tropes from rousing…
Part good. Part bad. All modern. RoboCop, everyone’s favorite cinematic cyborg do-gooder, returns to the big screen after a 21-year absence, now in a shiny, sanitized package that smartly brings the character into our post-9/11 reality only to malfunction halfway through by blandly defanging the franchise’s satirical bite. The opening chunk of José Padilha’s 2014…
Cuban Fury is, among other things, the result of a drunken email in which Nick Frost asked his producer if she thought a movie in which he dances would be a good idea. Evidently she did, and so the film came about. It prescribes very much to Nick Frost’s style of humor, but many are…
When it comes to tales of familial strife, movies sure love to put the fun in dysfunctional. But in the dark, depressing August: Osage County, the Weston family settles for nothing less than the whole word. There’s nothing particularly fun about this group, not when it’s just matriarch Violet (Meryl Streep) screaming at patriarch Beverly…
I’m a horror fan who teaches high school English, so a side effect of those combined characteristics is my knowledge of young adult (YA) fiction, and usually the darker stuff at that. I’ve read all of the Harry Potter, Twilight, and Hunger Games books like most people, and I’ve come away with mixed reactions (typically,…
Phobias. They affect millions of people on a daily basis. Some, like the fear of the dark, public speaking and spiders, can be sympathized with. But having a fear of just about everything, up to and including laundromats? Well, that’s downright crazy, and Jack (Simon Pegg, “The World’s End”), the man who suffers from said…
