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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Warts, entrails and all, I had a ball at "Zombieland." It's 81 minutes of my kind of stupid. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Certain images in Jane Campion's "Bright Star" are beautiful, as opposed to merely attractive, and only a major talent could've produced them. My favorite is a sun-drenched shot of Abbie Cornish's Fanny Brawne, her head and heart newly opened to the intoxication of love and poetry, lying on her bed, with a perfectly timed breeze fluttering her curtains just so. Cornish enters this early 19th century dream world of Brawne's relationship with the poet John Keats (played by Ben Whishaw) like an explorer seeking something she doesn't believe exists, which makes her fulfillment - however short-lived - all the sweeter. Writer-director Campion has stripped everything down in "Bright Star" to focus on this feeling, and a few brief years of Fanny's story. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Since I sort of liked "Step Up 2: The Streets," I'm not surprised I sort of liked the remake of "Fame." Clearly my genetic code favors a lack of judgment when it comes to cliche bombs with musical numbers attached to them, especially if they recycle a story of teenagers with a yen for the business we call show, following their dreams, their feet, their hopes, their hearts, their muses, that sort of thing. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Roger Moore
A widowed dad doesn't quite come to grips with his shortcomings as a parent in "The Boys Are Back." This mournful melodrama serves up Clive Owen as a "free range" parent in a movie that argues that no matter how selfish or irresponsible, Dad is still the right one to raise his son. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Fairly inventive and exceedingly manic, "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" comes from the 1978 picture book by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett. To say the title helped sell the kids story is an understatement, certainly the only understatement involved with the movie version. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Gary Goldstein
Director Steve Jacobs and his screenwriter wife Anna-Maria Monticelli's respectful - and respectable - adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel "Disgrace" proves a double-edged sword. Although they have taken pains to stay true to the author's structure, tone and purpose, their fidelity results in a film that's absorbing but often bloodless and, frankly, depressing. There's no arguing, however, that Jacobs and Monticelli have approached their challenging source material with a clear and committed cinematic vision. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
From her earlier days and nights as a blogger and a pole dancer, screenwriter Diablo Cody knows a lot about the power of eyeballs, the predominance of the male gaze and the raging narcissism that feeds so many personalities, good and evil. Cody's Oscar-winning script for "Juno" revealed a highly stylized comic sensibility, as well as an arch-fiend of cleverness behind each turn of phrase. Her second script to reach the screen is "Jennifer's Body," which, like its privileged title character both before and after demonic possession, would seem to have everything going for it. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
Love happens. Doesn't it, though? So do other, less pleasant fragrances. So do other things, sometimes. This much is clear in the well-acted fraud "Love Happens," a blend of pathos and rom-com adorability co-written and directed, woozily, by first-time feature filmmaker Brandon Camp. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Michael Phillips
There's a scene in the deliciously deadpan new Steven Soderbergh comedy "The Informant!" where corporate whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, a rising star at Archer Daniels Midland Co., spills his guts in a courtroom, pleading his essential - if not legal - innocence. In a drama, such a scene would come from the heart and aim for the gut. Here, though, we're in the company of a very slippery fish, and the scene strikes the tone of an Oscar acceptance speech delivered by a man who didn't actually win the award. more |
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Chicago Tribune: Betsy Sharkey
Wading right into the muck of our most basic consumption addictions with an armload of facts and a terrific sense of irony, "No Impact Man" follows activist writer Colin Beavan through a year as he tries to answer the question nagging his guilty liberal soul: "What if I tried not to hurt the environment? Is it possible? Is it comfortable?" more |
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