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Lewis Beale

THE HOTTEST STATE

Remember those stories and poems you wrote as a teenager? The ones you’re embarrassed to read these days because they’re so full of mushy sentimentality and self-absorbed angst? Well, Ethan Hawke has made a movie out of his youthful musings, and it’s as cringe-worthy as the stuff you penned back...

EL CANTANTE

Known as “La Voz” (the voice), Hector Lavoe was for a time in the 1960s and ’70s the biggest star in the Latin music firmament. A passionate singer whose collaborations with bandleader Willie Colon were both musically innovative and highly danceable, Lavoe was also a tortured drug addict who...

SUNSHINE

It's the year 2057, and our sun is dying. An eight-member crew has been sent out on the spaceship Icarus II, which is carrying a nuclear device that will be dropped into the star. The chain reaction it causes will hopefully reignite the solar orb, and save the Earth.As with just about every space...

RESCUE DAWN

In 1997, Werner Herzog made Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a documentary about Dieter Dengler, a German-born fighter pilot flying for the U.S. Navy who was shot down over Laos in 1965. Now he's decided to dramatize that story in a feature film, with Christian Bale giving a powerhouse performance as...

FIDO

Since zombies seem to be the hot horror commodity these days, it certainly makes sense that some filmmakers would take these scary, flesh-eating constructs and have a little fun with them. Case in point: Shaun of the Dead, a truly inspired bit of wackiness that must have had zombie-master George...

LONELY HEARTS

The story of "Lonely Hearts" killers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez has been told several times before, most notably in director Leonard Castle's 1970 cult classic The Honeymoon Killers. (Mexican director Arturo Ripstein also took a crack at the same material in Deep Crimson.) A pair of...

SHOOTER

A combination of familiar action film tropes and post-9/11 political paranoia, Shooter hits the ground running, and never lets up steam. It's got a plot that's beyond belief, but who really cares when things are this mindlessly entertaining?Director Antoine Fuqua's film opens in Ethiopia, where a...

BLESSED BY FIRE

Led by a vicious and corrupt military dictatorship, Argentina occupied the desolate Falkland Islands, whose ownership had long been disputed, under the mistaken assumption that the British colonial powers would never fight back. Wrong, boyo! Britain sent a full naval task force to the South...

ADAM'S APPLES

Writer-director Anders Thomas Jensen has already gained some international notoriety thanks to his offbeat screenplays for Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and Open Hearts, so it should come as no surprise that his latest work pushes the boundaries of weirdness, yet manages to be a moving look into...

THE HOST

Six years after the U.S. Army dumps gallons of aging formaldehyde into Seoul's Han River, a mutant sea monster emerges from its depths and begins to terrorize the populace. Most affected are the family of food-stall owner Park Heui-bong (Byeon Heui-bong), whose granddaughter, the teenage Hyeon...