Director Sam Raimi has managed to hang on to his joyous enthusiasm for movement and shock throughout his career, from his $375,000 feature debut “The Evil Dead” to the new $200 million “Oz the Great and Powerful.”
Some might describe his directorial touches as surface-level, or call his movies shallow.
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While spooky fairy tales once were intended to entertain and teach children life lessons, thanks to a current cinematic trend, they have become big, loud, explosive and curiously innocuous.
The new “Jack the Giant Slayer” is like a giant itself — dull, slow-moving and slow-witted.
Packed with rampaging special effects, it mostly forgoes simple themes in the 200-year-old “Jack and the Beanstalk” story.
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In the underrated “Faster,” Dwayne Johnson — the wrestler also known as “The Rock” — showed that a rock could cry. He played a morally complex character painted in shades of gray and pulled it off nicely.
In the new “Snitch,” he tries for a similarly layered hero and proves he’s no fluke. But he also proves that every good performer and every good story needs an equally good director. Ric Roman Waugh, a former stuntman on “Lethal Weapon 2,” the original “Total Recall” and “Gone in 60 Seconds,” isn’t quite it.
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Weirdly, this year’s Oscar nominees involve snubs in nearly every category, and films, mostly of a certain type, driven by successful marketing campaigns.
Why can’t the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences admit that blockbusters such as “Skyfall,” “The Dark Knight Rises” and “The Avengers,” and comedies including “Bernie” and “Moonrise Kingdom,” were among 2012’s best of the year rather than so-called important dramas?
Still, many good films may win. Here are our predictions and picks in major categories.
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Director Roman Coppola doesn’t deny that his second feature film, “A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III,” is a personal movie that may not have mainstream appeal. The film, which opens today, is a kind of comical, hallucinogenic dreamscape about a 1970s-era artist (Charlie Sheen) who designs record covers and is suffering as a result of a terrible breakup.Recently in town to promote the movie, Coppola, who went through a bad breakup himself “many years ago,” says he tried to capture the specific state of mind of someone in such turmoil.
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Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns called in an expert when making “Side Effects,” their new twisty, puzzle-box thriller about a depressed young woman and her relationship with two psychiatrists.
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“Warm Bodies” is a new kind of zombie movie — the hero actually is a zombie. And he’s not just any hero. He’s a romantic lead who falls in love with a human girl.
Writer-director Jonathan Levine (“50/50”) and actors Dave Franco and Analeigh Tipton recently visited The City to chat about the movie, opening today, which is based on a young-adult novel by Isaac Marion.
For Levine, zombie movies are about collective vs. individual consciousness.
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Like last year’s Snow White movies, “Mirror Mirror” and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” the new “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” comes from the Brothers Grimm, although in this case, the Grimms merely recorded a German tale that, before 1812, was an oral tradition.
But unlike 2012’s movies, “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” bravely gets a little crazy.
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Like last year’s Snow White movies, “Mirror Mirror” and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” the new “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” comes from the Brothers Grimm, although in this case, the Grimms merely recorded a German tale that, before 1812, was an oral tradition.
But unlike 2012’s movies, “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” bravely gets a little crazy.
It begins with a simple idea: After young Hansel and Gretel kill the witch in the cottage made of gingerbread and candy, they continue on their path, killing more witches and rescuing more kidnapped kids.
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Directed by newcomer Andy Muschietti and produced by veteran Guillermo del Toro, the new horror movie “Mama” reveals how scary motherhood can be.
One woman who surprisingly finds herself in a parental role is Annabel (Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain), a black-haired, raccoon-eyed rock ’n’ roller who once let out a happy “whoop” upon discovering she wasn’t pregnant.
Her boyfriend is Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), an artist who spent five years searching for his missing brother and two nieces.
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When Marlon Wayans was a kid in New York City, he lived down the street from a plant that printed Mad magazine.
He and his brothers would read copies for free, savoring the vicious wit of the movie parodies.
Years later, he became the co-creator of a series of successful parody movies in the same vein, from “Scary Movie” and “Dance Flick” to his latest, “A Haunted House.”
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“Zero Dark Thirty” is extraordinary not because it’s about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, but because Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow uses the subject to examine related, and equally important, topics.
In another filmmaker’s hands, the movie would likely have been something to tolerate during awards season before being forgotten. Yet Bigelow has created the best film of 2012.
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It’s evident from watching “The Sopranos” that David Chase is a rock ‘n’ roll fan. His love for the music is comes to the fore in his big-screen directing debut, “Not Fade Away.”
Best known for writing for television, Chase worked on shows like “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” and “The Rockford Files” before creating the groundbreaking “The Sopranos,” which ran from 1999 to 2007. And even though Chase likes “Mad Men” and “Boardwalk Empire” today, he considers himself more of a movie guy.
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Though Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables" has been made into many movies, adapting it from the monumental stage musical to the screen for the first time seems like it would be daunting.
But Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper ("The King's Speech") decided to let go of cinematic tricks and simply have the cast sing the famed songs by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil and Herbert Kretzmer live – recording them right there on camera.
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Outrageously talented writer-director Quentin Tarantino has made tightly constructed, polished films as well as outrageously diverging works of near-insanity.
He also is a brilliant critic, somewhat like Jean-Luc Godard, making movies about movies and deconstructing them in endlessly inventive ways.
Even Godard hit rough patches. With “Django Unchained,” opening Tuesday, Tarantino takes a small story and turns it into a big sprawl, and the fit isn’t quite right. The movie’s points are so broad — slavery is bad, movies never show it — they almost drift by unnoticed.
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