The Lovely Bones -- Film Review
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Paul Cotter's semi-autobiographical debut feature, "Bomber," is a poignant, featherweight comedy whose material is too thin to justify its feature length.
This is the perfect illustration of the banality of most scare movies as it's a horror movie without any horror until the last reel when fake blood gets painted on actors.
"Gentlemen Broncos" has little to offer besides unrelenting strangeness.
Audiences of "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant" might get lost in its unwieldy mixture of the undead, teenage antics, failed comedy and circus freaks.
"Stan Helsing," being given a perfunctory pre-Halloween release, is highly unlikely to achieve the success of "Scary Movie," which Zenga executive produced, or even his "Soul Plane."
Art squares off against commerce, brother against brother, in this satirical look at age-old conflicts.
Tom Weidlinger's "Jim Thorpe, The World's Greatest Athlete" is an uninspired documentary about a gifted, extraordinarily versatile man.
This potboiler has some thrills, but it will not make much of a splash at the boxoffice.
Francesca Comencini's "The White Space" is a thought-provoking, articulate look at what motherhood means to women who have come a long way in their social emancipation and don't necessarily want to bear children.
"Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis" is a compelling but lopsided documentary that is best viewed by reading between the lines.
Seymour Cassel has to suppress much of his natural on-screen amiability to play a selfish, off-putting troublemaker in "Reach for Me," a pedestrian, tear stained melodrama that seems tailor made for straight-to-cable broadcast.
"Mississippi Damned" is an unsparing insight into self-destructive patterns and malaise: alcoholism, welfare dependency, teen pregnancy, unemployment and spousal abuse all roil in this powerful entrant. Plaudits to filmmaker Tina Mabry for her tightly wound and explosive story.
"Food Beware" follows a group of French schoolchildren as they grow a garden, eat organic food and learn about the importance of consuming food without chemicals.
Pretty people suit up in skimpy swimsuits under the crystal blue waters of the Bahamas in India's most expensive ($21 million) film to date.
Tragedy hangs over a small Bosnian village like a looming winter storm in "Snow," a soberly restrained drama concerning a group of women eking out a hardscrabble existence while trying to come to terms with their grief following a national convulsion of war and ethnic cleansing.
"Ong Bak 2" is a throwback to the kung fu flicks of a previous generation. First-rate action scenes alternate with florid melodrama, and jaw-dropping stunts try to compensate for saccharine plot twists.
When a man's wife breaks the news that she has met someone else after 21 years of marriage, the husband and four friends kidnap her lover while deciding whether to kill him in Malcolm Venville's study of misogyny, "44 Inch Chest."
In "The Stepfather," you know who the killer is, his MO and who his intended victims are. So you wait for his innocent prey to catch on -- or not. Do dumb fictional families deserve their fictional fate?
The German mountain climbing film, "North Face," more than delivers on the excitement and terror of this existential flirtation with one's own mortality. Where it falters is trying to link this event to Nazi-era politics and a feeble love story.
"Little Nicolas" is technically proficient, features two of France's best comic actors and has been timed to mark the 50th anniversary of cartoon character Le Petit Nicolas' first appearance in print.
The plight of minorities and refugees in war-scarred Iraq is encapsulated by an illegal multi-ethnic settlement that tries to stage a friendly soccer match under obstacle-strewn conditions in "Kick Off."
In "Paju," director Park Chan Ok keeps the camera on a man while looking at the influence and impact three women have on his life. Rarely is such detail and veracity bestowed on female characters in Korean mainstream cinema.
Despite this promising subject matter, the film runs out of steam two-thirds of the way through and becomes a sort of Palestinian "Porky's," ending with a fast-forward 30 years into the future that is confusing and abrupt.
In "Law Abiding Citizen," a sociopath goes on a rampage, killing major officials in Philadelphia and holding the entire city hostage. He essentially is a character elevated out of the ranks of horror films who instead of killing teenagers, destroys adults reacting to career dictates.
Based on a story by Kwon Jeong-saeng, "Mongsil" is a harrowing period drama about a young girl bounced back and forth between her mother, step-mother, father, and a kindly stranger as she struggles to care for her younger sister in the mid 1940s to the early '50s.
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