Pavilion: BAMcinemaFest Review

NEW YORK Many teenagers experience life as perpetual drama, a series of mysteries and crises in which they are the constant protagonist. Tim Sutton's Pavilion is not about those kids. Bathed in twilight and unawkward silences, it envisions an adolescence not battled or endured but simply lived, for as long as it lasts. The nearly plotless, largely dialogue-free film is made for a small sliver of the arthouse demographic, but love from fest audiences could help its chances there. Clearly influenced by the extended-take outings of Gus Van Sant and...

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Radio Unnameable: BAMcinemaFest Review

NEW YORK Arguing for the cultural importance of a figure known largely to an insular group of admirers, Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson's Radio Unnameable finds community among the isolated New Yorkers who, for reasons of temperament or graveyard-shift employment, need a radio for company in the wee hours. Likely to find a small but receptive audience here, it also has just enough broader significance to merit small-screen circulation beyond...

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Tyler Perry's Madea's Witness Protection: Film Review

Madea is starting to look a little tired. No wonder, considering that shes now starring in her seventh film iteration for her alter ego, the alarmingly prolific actor-filmmaker Tyler Perry. But in the (as usual) self-branding titled Tyler Perrys Madeas Witness Protection, this prototypical angry black woman seems content to merely roll her eyes or mutter to herself as commit physical mayhem. PHOTOS: Teflon Actor Awards: 6 Stars Immune to Bad Reviews...

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Big Easy Express: LAFF Review

With the passing of bluegrass and folk music icons Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson earlier this year, the trajectory of American roots music was shaken to the core. Trendsetters in their day, these musicians helped create the gold standard of modern American acoustic music, along with legends like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. With the relentless ascendancy of frequently forgettable pop music, the baton has made a sometimes shaky transition...

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Savages: Film Review

To anyone who has missed the Oliver Stone of Natural Born Killers and U Turn while wading through the more recent and conventional likes of World Trade Center and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Savages represents at least a partial resurrection of the director's more hallucinatory, violent, sexual and, in a word, savage side. This intense and unavoidably gory adaptation of Don Winslow's wild best-seller about the incursion of Mexican drug cartel...

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Without Gorky: LAFF Review

As the title of Cosima Spenders documentary suggests, the painter Arshile Gorky both is and isnt its subject. The filmmaker acknowledges the enduring power of his work and his profound influence on Abstract Expressionism, but the true focus of Without Gorky is the reverberations of his suicide on the family he left behind. More than 60 years after his death, theyre still grappling with the emotional fallout, Spender included shes the artists...

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Gypsy: Film Review

Awkwardly blending neo-realism with heavy-handed allusions to Hamlet, Gypsy depicts the troubled life of a Roma teen in Slovakia with ethnological precision but turgid dramaturgy. Although valuable for shedding light on this relatively unseen population of Eastern Europe, Martin Suliks film, currently receiving its U.S. theatrical premiere at NYCs Film Forum, suffers from serious overstuffing. The central character is fourteen-year-old Adam (Janko...

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Falling Flowers: Shanghai Review

The main interest in the overly classical period piece Falling Flowers is its faithful retelling of the life of renowned woman writer Xiao Hong (1911-1942), whose bold independence and devotion to art strikes a modern chord. Though this biopic that doesnt scratch the surface very deeply, director Huo Jianqi (Postmen in the Mountains, Life Show) is a sure-handed craftsman whose portrait of the artist has a strongly emblematic quality; had it also been moving, it would have had wider art house appeal. As stands, it should entice curious festival...

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Day of the Flowers: Edinburgh Review

His role may be secondary, but ballet-superstar Carlos Acosta's quietly promising feature-film debut is the saving grace of would-be crowdpleaser Day of the Flowers, a broad-strokes comedy-drama about Scottish sisters discovering family secrets on a visit to Cuba. After bowing at Edinburgh to largely tepid reception, this blandly-handled affair may - like director John Robert's last outing, BBC doggie tale Station Jim (2001) - prove a better fit for domestic television than theaters or festivals. Overseas, the presence of Acosta will be the main...

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Day of Flowers: Edinburg Review

His role may be secondary, but ballet-superstar Carlos Acosta's quietly promising feature-film debut is the saving grace of would-be crowdpleaser Day of the Flowers, a broad-strokes comedy-drama about Scottish sisters discovering family secrets on a visit to Cuba. After bowing at Edinburgh to largely tepid reception, this blandly-handled affair may - like director John Robert's last outing, BBC doggie tale Station Jim (2001) - prove a better fit for domestic television than theaters or festivals. Overseas, the presence of Acosta will be the main...

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The Last Elvis: LAFF Review

Like another recent feature from Latin America, 2008s Tony Manero, the Argentine drama The Last Elvis (El ltimo Elvis) revolves around a pop-culture obsession that has tipped into the territory of dangerous delusion. But director Armando Bos first feature a selection of the recent Los Angeles Film Festival is nowhere near as dark or politically pointed as the earlier film from Chile. Anchored by a knockout performance by real-life Elvis Presley...

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Breakfast With Curtis: LAFF Review

A slew of independent movies in the early 2000s, including Little Miss Sunshine, Juno and Napoleon Dynamite among them, seem to have somehow convinced a subsequent wave of filmmakers that its sufficient for films to simply be quirky to succeed. In her third feature, writer-director Laura Colella enters similarly idiosyncratic territory, but with decidedly less persuasive results. Too unfocused to be considered a coming-of-ager, theres little indication...

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Pincus: LAFF Review

Sufficiently mundane to assure ongoing obscurity beyond the film festival circuit, writer-director David Fensters second feature might have a shot finding an audience online if it can manage to build a viral following, unlikely for such a low-key drama.goin Now in his 30s, semi-employed Pincus Finster (David Nordstrom) lives at home in Miami so he can care for his dad (Paul Fenster), a mid-stage Parkinsons patient suffering from dementia. Hes...

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It's a Disaster: LAFF Review

As a movie topic, the end of the world has enjoyed an upsurge in popularity in recent years, from art-house meditations to popcorn extravaganzas. Writer-director Todd Berger brings a fresh stamp to Armageddon with his sharply scripted comedy Its a Disaster, which is anything but. PHOTOS: LAFF 2012: Canon Celebrates Cinematographers and THR Hosts a Reception Berger, whose engaging murder mystery mashup The Scenesters favored style over substance,...

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Ice Age: Continental Drift: Film Review

Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel gets a well-earned promotion from series mascot to plot catalyst in Ice Age: Continental Drift, the anticipated fourth entry in the hugely successful computer-animated franchise. As Scrats star rises, however, the series momentum stalls. Faced with the prospect of deviating from the well-trodden tracks of its predecessors, the scriptwriters clearly got cold feet, merely substituting kid-friendly pirates for the...

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Grabbers: Edinburgh Review

EDINBURGH - Many-tentacled alien beasties menace a County Donegal fishing-village in Jon Wright's larkish, booze-soaked horror-comedy Grabbers, which could charitably be described as whole-heartedly embracing the well-worn clichs of the genre.This UK/Irish co-production has garnered mainly enthusiastic reactions from festival-goers since premiering at Sundance in January, but is never quite funny, scary or original enough to break out beyond its...

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Magic Mike: Film Review

NEW YORK In Magic Mike, Channing Tatums pre-Hollywood experience as a male stripper has inspired not only one of his better roles, but also arguably the raunchiest, funniest and most enjoyably nonjudgmental American movie about selling sex since Boogie Nights, its obvious if considerably darker precursor. Delivering what feels like a young directors work and not that of a guy nudging 50, Steven Soderbergh taps into the jazzy erotic energy that...

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Brake: Edinburgh Review

EDINBURGH - High-octane claustrophobia is the aim of Brake, a low-budget, high-concept thriller almost entirely set in the trunk of a car. But a nicely twisty finale notwithstanding, the picture plays very much like a opportunistic, cheap-and-cheerful redux of Buried, Rodrigo Cortes' man-in-a-coffin Ryan Reynolds vehicle from 2010. IFC Films gave this virtual one-man show for Stephen Dorff a fleeting two-theater US release in March - a prelude...

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Follow Follow: Shanghai Review

One of the first rock 'n roll films ever authorized by the Chinese Film Bureau, the slight but charming Follow Follow is not a docu about Beijings youthful music scene, glimpsed only in passing, but a wry, fetching tale about a lonely girl whose adoration of Kurt Cobain leads her to write a song and sing with a band. This one-man show won young writer-director-editor-composer Peng Lei, the frontman of Beijings well-known band New Pants, the best...

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Ted: Film Review

The merrily rude humor of Family Guy slides right into feature films with nary a burp nor a fart in Ted, a raucously funny goof about a boozing, pot-smoking, foul-mouthed teddy bear who would be instant new best friends with The Hangover guys. Not too many films serve up laughs that just keep on rolling with regularity from beginning to end, but Seth MacFarlane's directorial debut does so and without any feeling of strain. There's admittedly something...

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Mission to Lars: Film Review

How does a man with severe learning disabilities get to meet his hero, the drummer with the planet's biggest heavy rock band? In the case of this slight but warm-hearted British documentary, he embarks on a road trip across California and Nevada with his brother and sister, hoping for a backstage chat and impromptu drum lesson from Metallica's Lars Ulrich. Just as long as he can keep his panic attacks and wild mood swings in check. The filmmakers first pitched Mission to Lars to TV networks, who turned down the subject matter flat. Undaunted, they...

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