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ANN LEWINSON
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Everybody loves Bernie
So beloved was Bernie that when he shot his elderly companion Marjorie Nugent, the meanest — and richest — woman in town, district attorney Danny Buck Davidson had to move the trial nearly 50 miles away.
Why not?
Hasbro's Transformers have made a mint; why not make a movie out of Battleship ?
Wound tight
Kari Ames (Sharon Leal) has it all: a handsome professor husband (Blair Underwood), an adorable six-year-old (Zoe Carter), and a sweet home in New Orleans' Garden District.
One-sided rivalry
As one-sided rivalries go, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar Aba) has it bad.
Putting 3D to good use
Who could have predicted that it would take the surviving leading lights of the New German Cinema to put 3D to good use?
A Muppets for our ironic age
It's tough when your brother Gary is played by Jason Segel and you're only three feet tall and made of felt.
A valentine to early cinema
Martin Scorsese goes Spielberg with Hugo, as dumbed-down as the shortening of the title of Brian Selznick's Caldecott winner implies.
Unfilmable and inscrutable
How do you film Stephenie Meyer's unfilmable Breaking Dawn ?
Employees plot to take back what was rightfully theirs from an embezzling billionaire
Ruth Madoff's 60 Minutes interview last week might as well have been set up by the makers of Tower Heist .
Harold and Kumar are back, still high
"Hasn't the whole 3D thing jumped the shark by now?"
Depp as the younger Hunter S. Thompson
It's neat seeing Depp, more than a decade after his balding Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , as the younger Hunter S. Thompson, softening mannerisms later made brittle with cocaine, even if the performance is all surface.
Little to offer
Aside from the fan-cam, 3 has little to offer: the camera is shakier and 2 's ludicrous backstory is continued.
A small improvement
Like 2007's underrated Mr. Bean's Holiday, Johnny English Reborn, directed by Oliver Parker, improves on its unwatchable predecessor.
Dumbed down
The financial crisis of 2008 awaits its Social Network; until then we have Margin Call, which zaps its credibility from the get-go when a downsized risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) openly passes a flash drive to an underling (Zachary Quinto) as he's escorted him from the building by security.
Boxing robots. Enough said.
Charlie Kenton is America.
White-savior storyline
Jesus does funny things to people: one day you're sitting on a toilet shooting heroin; the next you're building an orphanage in war-torn southern Sudan.
Having it all
Sarah Jessica Parker plays a Boston investment manager — not a baker or a caterer — in a this movie by Douglas McGrath ( Emma ) that's otherwise as retro as a Katherine Heigl chick flick.
Schoolgirls in hijabs
Circumstance begins like an early Kiarostami film, but with schoolgirls in hijabs instead of schoolboys in sweaters.
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