DVDs In Brief: April 14, 2010
Do you like montages, but grow bored with the tedious plot bits between them? Then Pirate Radio is the movie for you. Director Richard Curtis, the one-man British rom-com machine behind the scripts for Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill, and the Bridget Jones movies, follows up Love Actually with another spirited ensemble piece, featuring such big talents as Philip Seymour Hoffman, Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson, and Nick Frost. Most of them play the DJs of Radio Rock, a 1966 pirate radio ship that piped the devil’s music to the British populace from offshore. But the great soundtrack serves only to push the torpid narrative forward…
Fans of volatile character actor Michael Shannon have reason to be excited to see him as the lead in the throwback film noir The Missing Person, which casts him as a down-and-out gumshoe assigned to shadow a man on a train. But when Noah Buschel’s moody independent feature inserts a 9/11 connection into the proceedings, the rich atmosphere collapses into mawkishness.
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It’s a cheap faux-found-footage film about killer moon rocks, but at least the director and editor love it.
January 30, 2012That Jason Bateman/Ryan Reynolds body-switch comedy with the pooping and farting? It’s really about the human condition.
January 9, 2012The stars had fun (and discomfort) selecting women by their breasts and making ballet gestures, but that doesn’t make the latest Conan any more watchable.
December 5, 2011