Movies

‘Alice in Wonderland’

As a young reader, I found “Alice in Wonderland” creepy and rather distasteful. Alice’s adventures played like a series of encounters with ­characters whose purpose was to tease, puzzle and torment her. Few children would want to...

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‘Brooklyn’s Finest’

Three cops, three journeys to what we suspect will be doom. No good can come of the lives they lead. They aren’t bad guys, not precisely, but they occupy a world of such unremitting violence and cynicism that they’re willing to do what it takes to survive. In the kind of coincidence provided only by fate or screenplays, each one will mean trouble for the other two.

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‘The White Ribbon’

Something is wrong in the village. Some malevolent force, some rot in the foundation. This wrongness is first sensed in a series of ­incidental “accidents.” Then the murder of a child takes place. This forces villagers, who all know one another, to look around more carefully. Is one of them guilty? How can that be?

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In Focus

On love and ‘War’

As we enter the fourth month of streaming coverage of the Tiger Woods adultery scandals and his ensuing personal turmoil, it seems that our fascination with the sensation of a good marriage gone bad is alive and well. Social-­networking sites regularly provide ringside seats to the theatrics of relationship discord.

More Movie Reviews

‘Cop Out’

Jimmy and Paul are cops hunkered down across the street from a stakeout when they see a mysterious figure run across rooftops and break into a house. Seconds later, he can clearly be seen in an upper window, sitting on a toilet and reading a magazine. “What kindofa guy breaks into a house and takes a crap?” asks Paul, or words to that effect.

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‘Blood Done Sign My Name’

In 1970 in Oxford, N.C., it was perfectly ­possible for a young black man to be beaten and clubbed by three whites, and shot dead by one of them. And for an all-white jury to hear from two eyewitnesses, and watch the white defendant’s young son break down in tears and confess his testimony had been forced on him by his father’s lawyers.

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‘Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief’

Every movie involving superheroes requires an origin story, and “Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief” has a doozy. The Greek gods on Mount Olympus sometimes descend to Earth to have children, you see, and these half-god, half-humans are demigods. They live among us.

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‘Shutter Island’

“Shutter Island” starts working on us with the first musical notes under the Paramount mountain, even before the film starts. They’re ominous and doomy. So is the film. This is Martin Scorsese’s evocation of the delicious shuddering fear we feel when horror movies are about something and don’t release all the tension with action scenes.

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‘From Paris with Love’

Pauline Kael already has reviewed this movie in her book “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” and it only took her the title. I could go through my usual vaudeville act about chase scenes and queasy-cams and Idiot Plots, but instead I’d like you to join me in the analysis of something that increasingly annoys me.

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