If “Limitless” were mixed with “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and perhaps “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” you’d end up somewhere near to John Dies at the End. Directed by Don Coscarelli (best known for cult hits “Phantasm” and “Bubba Ho-Tep”), the trippy feature blurs the lines of reality as it follows around best friends…
Movie 43 is basically the first new comedy of 2013 (“A Haunted House” does not count). It’s not, however, a comedy in the normal sense. 12 directors — Elizabeth Banks, Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Rusty Cundieff, James Duffy, Griffin Dunne, Peter Farrelly, Patrik Forsberg, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, Brett Ratner, and Jonathan van Tulleken —…
Arnold is back — and he’s bitter. And so is the script for The Last Stand. After two terms as governor of “Cally-fornia,” as well as bit parts in a few movies here and there, Arnold Schwarzenegger has finally returned to his above-title billing as the action hero we’ve come to expect: The lone wolf…
Some years ago I learned 1930s and ’40s era gangsters learned to talk “gangster” from the motion pictures. James Cagney probably had more to do with coining gangster lingo and slang than John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, and Al Capone combined. Gangster Squad gets the clothes right, does a decent job with 1949 era Los…
Spring break has been known to get out of control. For four bored bikini-clad college girls — Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine — the craziness comes in the form of robbing convenience stores to keep the party going. That is until a corn-rowed drug dealer (a hyped up James Franco) gets…
A cinematic peek behind the curtain of the raid that ended with Osama Bin Laden’s assassination in May 2011 is certainly an intriguing hook for a movie, but it’s far from the whole story that unfolds in Kathryn Bigelow’s tense, taut thriller Zero Dark Thirty. Achieving intimacy in this gigantic narrative about a decade-long manhunt…
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards knew each other as children, but the more appealing version of their later meeting on the Dartford Railway opens Not Fade Away. Mick has a stack of vinyl R&B LPs on his lap which Keith takes an active interest in and so began the Rolling Stones. This vignette also launches…
