'The English Teacher' Review: Agile Performances Elevate This Pleasant Comedy
May, 16, 2013 6:25 pm | Comments On #julianne moore, Lily Collins, Movies, Nathan Lane, the english teacher“Pleasant” is one of those words that English teachers and editors always put on their verboten lists for aspiring writers as being too vague and namby-pamby.
But pleasant is the perfect word with which to describe “The English Teacher,” an ingratiating little comedy that aims to please and succeeds at its modest goal.
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The movie’s heroine is Linda Sinclair (Julianne Moore), a 40something English teacher at a high school in Kingston, Pa., a suburban town in northwest Pennsylvania. A single woman, she spends her days in the classroom and her nights either out on what invariably turn out to...
Read More'Sightseers' Review: Chris & Tina's Excellent - Albeit Homicidal - Adventure
May, 09, 2013 12:20 pm | Comments On #Leah Rozen, Movies, reviews, Sightseers
Shortly after bashing a complete stranger to death with a cudgel and then smashing the man’s face against a boulder for good measure, Chris rifles through the contents of his victim’s backpack.
Having watched all this calmly, Tina, who is Chris’s girlfriend, makes a request: “See if he has any sandwiches,” she says. When Chris finds and hands one over, Tina avidly munches on it just feet from the bloody corpse.

“Sightseers” is a nasty but also very funny and...
Read More'The Iceman' Review: Michael Shannon Shines as Family Man, Mob Killer
May, 02, 2013 2:24 pm | Comments On #Chris Evans, Leah Rozen, Michael Shannon, Movies, review, The Iceman, Winona RyderRichard Kuklinski was a killer for hire who once claimed that he had, during the course of his lethal career in the New York and New Jersey underworld, sent more than 100 victims to their final rest.
He was convicted for five of those deaths in 1988 -- he pleaded guilty to yet another killing in 2003 -- and was sentenced to consecutive life terms. He died in a prison hospital in Trenton, N.J. in 2006 at age 70.
His story has now been brought to the big screen in “The Iceman,” a somewhat confused, brutal film that’s nonetheless compelling, mostly because of a mesmerizing performance by the gifted Michael Shannon (“Revolutionary Road” and HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”) as Kuklinski and evocative period details.
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Read More'Kon-Tiki' Review: A 1951 Oscar Documentary Winner Becomes a Rousing 2013 Adventure
April, 25, 2013 10:32 pm | Comments On #kon-tiki, Leah Rozen, movie reviews, Movies
Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer, had a radical idea. What if the Polynesian islands were settled by South Americans who’d sailed 5,000 miles west across the Pacific in hand-built rafts thousands of years ago rather than by nearby Asians?
In 1947 he put his theory to the test, building a primitive raft out of balsa wood and rope and enlisting five men to set sail with him from Peru bound for the Polynesia.
The perilous voyage, dependent only on wind power and the current, was a success and Heyerdahl, who died in 2002 at age 87, became world famous. His book about the expedition became an a bestseller and “Kon-Tiki,” the filmed record that he and his crew members made about the voyage, won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1951.
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Read More'Pain & Gain' Review: Funny But Bloated Three Stooges With Massive Pecs
April, 25, 2013 11:55 am | Comments On #Dwayne Johnson, Leah Rozen, Mark Wahlberg, movie reviews, Movies, pain and gain
Wonders never cease. Director Michael Bay has made a movie that’s more than just loud.
His latest, “Pain & Gain,” is an entertaining moral spoof about three lunkheads pursuing their own twisted version of the American Dream. The film is fun, fast and funny, but also a bloated 20 minutes or more than it needs to be.
Bay, whose box-office crushing oeuvre includes the loud and proud “Bad Boys,” “Armageddon,” “Pearl Harbor” and the “Transformers” trilogy, keeps the volume and action at full throttle in “Pain & Gain.” But -- and it’s a big but -- he has the advantage here over his earlier movies of working with a way smarter script, by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who previously collaborated on the “...
Read More'The Angels' Share' Review: Ken Loach Pours Engaging Shot of Scotch
April, 11, 2013 4:10 pm | Comments On #Ken Loach, MoviesKen Loach, the 76-year old, British filmmaker best known for his bleak political dramas such as “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” “Bread and Roses” and “Ladybird Ladybird,” has with “The Angels' Share” made a wee, entertaining comedy about the theft of high-priced scotch in Scotland.
Like most Loach films, it starts out focused on those barely clinging to the bottom rung of the social ladder, this time in Glasgow. Robbie (newcomer Paul Brannigan), a skinny runt of a young man, is up before a judge who’ll decide whether he goes to jail on an assault charge or can do community service instead.
The judge is feeling lenient and Robbie gets community service, a good thing since his girlfriend is about to have their first child. Harry (John Henshaw), the kindly fellow who runs the community service program, takes...
Read More'Upstream Color' Review: You'll Be Shocked, Repelled and Confused - but Never Bored
April, 04, 2013 10:27 am | Comments On #Leah Rozen, Movies, reviews, Shane Carruth, upstream color
This is an art-house movie with a capital "A." And you might as well capitalize the "R" and the "T," too, because films don’t come artier than this. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“Upstream Color” is the eagerly anticipated second film from Shane Carruth, an engineer turned self-taught filmmaker. His first movie was 2004’s "Primer," an intriguing, geeky time-travel thriller made for a reported $7,000 -- and which won the Grand Jury Prize for drama at the Sundance Film Festival.
Also read: 'The Company You Keep' Review: Fugitives, Radicals, Secrets...But Where's the...
Read More'Place Beyond the Pines' Review: Ryan Gosling + Bradley Cooper = Overwrought Daddy Issues
March, 28, 2013 12:04 pm | Comments On #bradley cooper, Leah Rozen, Movies, Place Beyond The Pines, reviews, Ryan GoslingBetter to have a film with a reach that exceeds its grasp than a movie with no ambition in its pretty little empty head beyond regurgitating the same tired old pabulum.
“The Place Beyond the Pines,” director-cowriter Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to his 2010 corrosive marital drama, “Blue Valentine," is plenty ambitious. If, in the end, it collapses on itself from trying to carry too heavy a symbolic load, one can still admire its attempted reach and several of the performances.

The focus of “Pines” is fathers and sons and how the relationship between the two, or lack of, leaves a lasting legacy. The film is...
Read More'Love and Honor' Review: Earnest But Predictable Soldier-in-Love Tale
March, 21, 2013 1:18 pm | Comments On #Liam Hemsworth, love and honor, Movies, Teresa PalmerIt is extraordinary how smoothly the Aussies do American accents.
Liam Hemsworth (“The Hunger Games”) and Teresa Palmer (“Warm Bodies”), two of the young actors holding down leading roles in this banal drama about love and friendship during the Vietnam War era, never once vocally betray their Antipodean origins.
That a viewer is paying more attention to the accent in which they say their words than the words themselves is indicative of the wan appeal of “Love and Honor.” Just as the war it depicts was known as the “living room war” because it was the first major conflict that most Americans watched unfold on their TV sets during the evening news, so this lightweight film will play better, and seems more suited, to the small screen at home than the large one at the multiplex.
Dalton (Austin Stowell, of TV’s...
Read More'Ginger & Rosa' Review: Affecting Portrait of Girls on the Verge
March, 14, 2013 1:42 pm | Comments On #alessandro nivola, Alice Englert, annette bening, Christina Hendricks, Elle Fanning, ginger and rosa, Movies, Oliver Platt, Sally Potter, timothy spallGrowing up is hard to do, as countless coming-of-age movies have shown, some more affectingly than others.
With “Ginger & Rosa,” British avant-garde filmmaker Sally Potter (“Orlando”), offers up a strong entry into the field with what is by far her most appealingly mainstream film to date.
An intimate character study, “Ginger & Rosa” is set in England in 1962. It’s told mainly from the viewpoint of Ginger (Elle Fanning), a 16-year old budding poet growing up in post-WWII England alongside her best friend, Rosa (Alice Englert, the daughter of director Jane Campion). The two were born on the same day, in the same hospital, and have been BFFs ever since.
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Description
Leah Rozen was the film critic at People Magazine for thirteen years, until she decided that seeing six to eight movies a week was cruel and unusual punishment. She has also written for the New York Times and such still lamented though long departed publications as Spy, Manhattan Inc. and New York Woman.
