Film clips

Friday, October 26, 2012

— At area theaters 68 ALEX CROSS, PG-13 Tyler Perry takes on the role of the title homicide detective/psychologist, who may have met his match in a serial killer (Matthew Fox). With Edward Burns, Rachel Nichols, Jean Reno; directed by Rob Cohen. (101 minutes) 85 ARBITRAGE, R Richard Gere plays a billionaire hedge fund magnate, the very portrait of success in American business, who, on the eve of his 60th birthday, finds himself desperately trying to sell his trading empire to a major bank before the extent of his fraud is discovered. (100 minutes) 89 ARGO, R Based on supposedly recently declassified documents.Ben Affleck directs and plays a CIA rescue specialist who concocts a cockeyed plot to create a fake movie as a way of rescuing six Americans who escaped the 1979 Iranian takeover of the American embassy and subsequent 444-day hostage crisis. (120 minutes) 71 ATLAS SHRUGGED PART II, PG-13 With the global economy on the brink of collapse and brilliantly creative folks continuing to mysteriously disappear, a tycoon discovers in an abandoned factory a revolutionary motor that could seemingly power the world. (112 minutes) 72 THE BOURNE LEGACY, PG-13 Jeremy Renner plays another estranged assassin, put through the same super-secret government genetic modification program that produced Jason Bourne, and who, like Bourne, has been marked for elimination. (135 minutes) 84 BRAVE, PG A courageous young Scottish princess (voice of Kelly Macdonald) inadvertently unleashes chaos in the kingdomwhile battling tradition, destiny and the fiercest of beasts and finding the meaning of true bravery. Animated. (100 minutes) 75 THE CAMPAIGN, R When a longterm North Carolina congressman (Will Ferrell) commits a major public gaffe before an election, a pair of ultra-wealthy CEOs plot to put up an unlikely rival candidate (Zach Galifianakis) to gain influence over their district. (97 minutes) 86 COMPLIANCE, R Ann Dowd plays the high-strung manager of an Ohio fast-food joint who launches, at the behest of a police officer whose over-the-phone questions become increasingly invasive, an investigation of an employee’s supposed theft of money from a customer. With Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp; directed by Craig Zobel. (90 minutes) 72 THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, PG-13 Christian Bale returns as the Caped Crusader, converted from hero to fugitive after he takes the blame for the death of District Attorney Harvey Dent, this time pitted against the deadly masked terrorist Bane (Tom Hardy) and cunning cat burglar Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman (Anne Hathaway). (164 minutes) 77 DREDD 3D, R Karl Urban plays the comic book character Sylvester Stallone first brought to the screen, the fearsome urban cop/ judge/jury/executioner, the only semblance of order in a chaotic, irradiated wasteland that used to be the East Coast, whose new challenge is to rid the city of a dangerous drug. (95 minutes) 88 END OF WATCH, R Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena play young cops patrolling the meanest streets of south-central Los Angeles. (109 minutes) 78 THE EXPENDABLES 2, R The reunited Expendables (SylvesterStallone, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Terry Crews), with a couple of new members (Liam Hemsworth, Yu Nan) aboard, take on what appears at first to be a simple job - until things go wrong, whereupon they are compelled to seek revenge in hostile territory where the odds are, of course, stacked against them. (102 minutes) 90 FINDING NEMO 3D, G Disney adds an extra dimension to the tale of animated and overly protective clownfish Marlin (voice of Albert Brooks) and fuzzy-minded fish Dory (voice of Ellen Degeneres), on a quest to rescue Marlin’s short-finned son Nemo (voice of Alexander Gould) after a fishing boat separates them in the Great Barrier Reef. (104 minutes) 75 FRANKENWEENIE, PG Director Tim Burton expands upon his early (1984) stop-motionanimated short film to create a full-length, stop-motion-animated, black-and-white, 3-D feature about a boy named Victor with abent for science and his dead dog, Sparky, whom he brings back to life - with just a few minor adjustments. (87 minutes) 85 HERE COMES THE BOOM, PG A former collegiate wrestler (Kevin James) is now a 40-something, apathetic biology teacher in a failing high school who begins, as cutbacks threaten to cancel the music program and lay off its teacher (Henry Winkler), to raise money by moonlighting as a mixed-martial-arts fighter. (105 minutes) 80 HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA, PG Dracula opens a lavish five-stake resort - where monsters and their families can live it up in safety and comfort, free from meddling from the human world - as a way of controlling the adventurous spirit of his teenage daughter, who’s in grave peril of falling for an ordinary human. Animated. (91 minutes) 70 ICE AGE: CONTINENTAL DRIFT, PG Squirrelly Scrat’s nutty, timeworn pursuit of the accursed acorntriggers a continental cataclysm, in the midst of which Manny, Diego and Sid encounter a ragtag menagerie of characters determined to stop them from returning home. Animated. (94 minutes) 87 LAWLESS, R Based on the true story of the infamous bootlegging Bondurant brothers, whose loyalty is put to the test against the backdrop of the nation’s most notorious crime wave in Prohibition-era Virginia. (115 minutes) 88 LOOPER, R In the not-too-distant future, time travel is real but illegal and only available on the black market, and the mob uses it to get rid of folks they don’t like by sending them 30 years into the past, where hired gun Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is waiting. Then the mob decides to close the loop and sends back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis). (118 minutes) 89 MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE’S MOST WANTED, PG Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Gloria the Hippoand Melman the Giraffe, still fighting to get home to their beloved Big Apple, find the perfect cover for a transit of Europe: a traveling circus. Animated. (93 minutes) 90 THE MASTER, R A young drifter (Joaquin Phoenix), picked up by the charismatic leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of a fringe religion, begins to doubt the faith - and his mentor. (137 minutes) 81 PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4, R More paranormal activity has been occurring since the new neighbors moved in next door. With Kathryn Newton, Matt Shively; directed by Henry Joost, Ariel Schulman. (88 minutes)88 PARANORMAN, PG Misunderstood Norman (voice of Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the only available ghoul whisperer when his small town comes under siege by zombies. Stop-motion animated. (93 minutes) 89 PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, PG-13 Logan Lerman plays a high-school freshman whose social prospects are limited by the recent death of a friend and an even more recent breakdown of sorts, until he befriends a charismatic, openly gay senior (Ezra Miller) and his stepsister (Emma Watson). (103 minutes) 81 PITCH PERFECT, PG-13 Anna Kendrick plays a college kid who finds herself in the midst of an unpopular group of misfit girls with one thing in common: how well they sing together. So of course they set forth to conquer the cutthroat world of college a cappella groups. (112 minutes) 68 THE POSSESSION, PG-13 Aftertheir youngest daughter becomes oddly obsessed with an antique wooden box she bought at a yard sale, a couple (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgwick) discover the presence of a malevolent force: The box was built to contain a dibbuk, a dislocated spirit that inhabits and ultimately devours its human host. (91 minutes) 67 RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION, R In this fifth installment in a continuing franchise, a deadly virus continues to transform humanity into legions of the flesh-eating undead, and globe-trotting Milla Jovovich remains humanity’s last hope. (97 minutes) 89 SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS, R A comedy in which a struggling screenwriter (Colin Farrell) inadvertently becomes entangled in the Los Angeles criminal underworld. (109 minutes) 82 SINISTER, R Ethan Hawke plays a true-crime novelist whose discovery of a box of mysterious, disturbing home movies plunges his family into a nightmarish experience of supernatural horror. (110 minutes) 72 TAKEN 2, PG-13 The retired CIA agent (Liam Neeson) who in the first movie stopped at nothing to save his daughter from Albanian kidnappers now has been taken hostage with his wife during a family vacation in Istanbul by the vengeful father of one of the original kidnappers. (92 minutes) 74 TOTAL RECALL, PG-13 A remake of the Paul Verhoeven/Arnold Schwarzenegger 1990 sci-fi trailblazer. (118 minutes) 86 TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE, PG-13 Clint Eastwood plays an ace baseball scout. (111 minutes)

Movie-rating

point system

Movies are rated on

a scale from 50 to

  1. Guidelines for

moviegoers:

96-100 Transcendent

90-95 Exceptional

80-89 Better than most to remarkable

70-79 Average

60-69 Awful to mediocre

50-59 Irredeemable

MovieStyle, Pages 37 on 10/26/2012