Movies

It barely shines.

Is it too scary for kids or plain funny for all ages?

This film can't even qualify as a dark horse.

Without Arnie, it's just a video game.

A cautionary tale about getting what you want.

A vivid and ultimaely depressing documentary about greed on the corporate and family level.

Set in a high-tech yet shabby future, the remake of Total Recall is a fully realized piece of production design. But its script, credited to six authors, is more like a preliminary sketch.

Directed by Underworld franchise veteran Len Wiseman, the movie retains some elements of Paul Verhoeven's friskier (and more graphically violent) 1990 original. Yet it also makes lots of changes, notably by downplaying the brain-bending aspects of the scenario in favor of thought-free action. (Also, it never leaves a devastated Earth for Mars.)

In the summer of 1970, a train carrying Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Buddy Guy and Janis Joplin rolled from Toronto to Calgary, stopping for scheduled concerts along the way.

Billed as the Canadian Woodstock, The Festival Express was a musician's dream and a promoter's nightmare. The train was loaded with musical instruments, food, liquor -- and a film crew.

Four boy-men guard their neighborhood from aliens.

Actress Lupe Ontiveros died Thursday of cancer at the age of 69. She was most famous for her role in the 1997 film Selena, but Ontiveros also acted with Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, played a strict mother in the independent film Real Women Have Curves and had a recurring role in the television series Desperate Housewives.

Desperate love with first-rate acting

The Deep Blue Sea

Grade: B

Director: Terence Davies (The House of Mirth)

Screenplay: Davies (From Terence Rattigan play)

Cast: Rachel Weisz (The Lovely Bones), Tom Hiddleston (The Avengers)

Rating: R

Runtime: 98 min.

by John DeSando

“Love, that's all.”  (Hester responds to her husband when he asks her what happened.)

Cinema Classics Kickoff Party
Friday, August 03, 2012 
(6:00 PM - 10:00 PM)
Gateway Film Center

Celebrate the launch of Cinema Classics with WCBE's own Johnny DiLoretto and John DeSando at 6 PM on Friday, August 3 before the premiere of DR. STRANGELOVE at 7 PM. Talk with John and Johnny about your favorite classic films while enjoying light hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar. Bar tended by celebrity bartender & WCBE staff member, Jim Coe.

The savings are never passed on to the consumer, but a little product placement has become standard practice for Hollywood movies — a pizza box here or a conspicuously angled soda can there, and few take notice. But product integration is another matter: If a movie has been explicitly designed to accommodate a sponsor, it's worse than just a commercial movie. It's a movie commercial.

Amid the slapstick comedies, sequels and superhero movies that have come to define summer moviegoing, two films opening today center on disturbed and disturbing romantic ties. Ruby Sparks and Killer Joe aren't fantasy or horror pictures, but they're within screaming distance — close enough to remind you how much deeper artists go when they barrel past realism into weirder areas of the psyche.

Energetic dance sequences tell a story of youthful rebellion against business development in Miami.

"This is our last song." You've probably heard words to that effect any number of times at concerts over the years, but when James Murphy said them on April 2, 2011, from the stage at Madison Square Garden, it was a little different.

This wasn't the last song before the encore. It wasn't the last song of the night, or the last song of the tour. This was to be the last song, period, that Murphy's band — the danceable indie-rock outfit LCD Soundsystem — would play together. Ever.

An informative  documentary about competition for Teen World Champion of magic.

Batman returns from self-imposed exile for 8 years to save Gotham again.

Academy Award-winning actress Celeste Holm has died. A star on both stage and screen, Holm was best known for roles in Gentleman's Agreement, All About Eve and Oklahoma! She was 95.

Holm died early Sunday morning in her Manhattan apartment with her husband, family and close friends by her side. She had been hospitalized a couple weeks ago following a fire in actor Robert De Niro's apartment in the same building.

If there was one role that put Holm on the map, it was as the coquettish Ado Annie, in the 1943 hit musical, Oklahoma!

No better comedic bromance this year and one of the best ever.