Carrie Review
Carrie might be one of the few cases not only of a remake that’s on par with the original, but of one that makes just enough tweaks in style, performance, and theme to warrant its existence.
Judy Greer
This Week in DVD: 3/12/13
This week brings out some heavy hitters at the video store including Life of Pi , The Master , Hitchcock , Smashed , Playing for Keeps , This Must be the Place , and A Late Quartet .
Playing for Keeps Review
The romantic comedy Playing for Keeps has an excellent first 45 minutes mostly because it isn’t trying to be a standard rom-com. What starts off as a curiously winning mixture of a kids sport’s movie and a racy, adult sex farce, however, gives way somewhat suddenly to become something that’s merely okay and not at all surprising.
Interview: Gerard Butler
That Shelf sits down with Playing for Keeps leading man Gerard Butler to talk about working with kids, his great cast, his fading accent, and trying to make a film with soccer as a backdrop in the United States.
This Week in DVD: 6/19/12
This week on video store shelves, Phil Brown stays home with Jeff, Who Lives at Home before developing Wanderlust , while heads out west to deal with zombies in Exit Humanity and Christian Slater in Dawn Rider before returning home to wreck the place with Project X Also, a few words about the now cancelled Canadian cult series Being Erica and the intriguing family documentary My Reincarnation .
The Nic Cage Project: Adaptation
To celebrate TIFF’s ongoing Bangkok Dangerous: The Cinema Of Nicolas Cage series, Alan Jones has resurrected his retrospective of the actor’s work entitled The Nic Cage Project. In this edition, Jones takes a look at Charlie and Donald Kaufman's brilliantly contrived Adaptation – playing tonight at the Lightbox.
Jeff, Who Lives at Home Review
We've all known people like the titular character of the Jay and Mark Duplass' Jeff, Who Lives at Home . Nice guys who mean well, but for whatever reason are going nowhere fast. The film suffers from a few of the same maladies that afflict its main character. At times the film feels like an aimless collection of circumstances and encounters because, well, it is precisely that. It's a meandering tale that doesn't really accomplish much in the telling.
The Descendants Review
In Alexander Payne’s The Descendants , the most catastrophic events that befall the main characters happen off screen, making it a kind of glossy kindred spirit to the more youth oriented romance Like Crazy and the much beloved cult drama Martha Marcy May Marlene . Payne creates a story about privileged people dealing with real world issues without a sense of detachment or boredom. Sofia Coppola should see this film and take notes.
