Michelle Pfeiffer

The Family

  • Title: The Family
  • IMDB: link

The FamilyAfter mixed success in the low-rent action genre, writer/director Luc Besson turned his attention to dark comedy with 2013’s The Family. The results of an American mobster (Robert De Niro) and his family (Michelle Pfeiffer, Dianna Agron, John D’Leo) in Witness Protection in small town in Normandy, France, is actually better than some of Besson’s other recent efforts (such as Taken 2).

Centered mostly on the family’s inability to adapt to new surroundings yet again after being forced to relocate by the FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) in charge of their safety we see several instances of “The Blakes” using violence, intimidation, and even explosives to get what they want.

De Niro has fun with the mobster’s selfish actions involving attacking both a plummer and the head of a local chemical plant polluting the water supply while working on memoirs no one in the FBI ever wants to see the light of day. He even agrees to speak at a local film debate where his real personal experience comes in very handy.

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New Year’s Eve

  • Title: New Year’s Eve
  • IMDB: link

new-years-eve-blu-rayNew Year’s Eve follows the lives of an ensemble of New Yorkers, somehow each of whom find themselves in a series of cliched, sickeningly sweet entanglements or awkward situations that only bad screenwriters can dream up, in the hours leading up to Times Square’s biggest night.

The cast includes a single man (Tad Hamilton) with car trouble dreaming of the woman he met last New Year’s Eve,  a single mother (Sarah Jessica Parker) whose teenage daughter (Abigail Breslin) wants to spend New Year’s Eve with a cute boy (Jake T. Austin) in Times Square, Robert De Niro as a man dying of cancer wanting to see the ball drop one last time and his doctor (Cary Elwes) and nurse (Halle Berry) who try to make his final hours comfortable, and a pair of couples (Seth Meyers, Jessica Biel and Til Schweiger, Sarah Paulson) jockeying to be the parents of the first born baby of the year.

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Gothic Melodrama

  • Title: Dark Shadows
  • IMDB: link

dark-shadows-posterLike most of director Tim Burton‘s work Dark Shadows, a humorous hyper-melodramatic update of the 1960’s television show of the same name, gives us an offbeat sense of humor and the macabre, Johnny Depp, and a big-eyed, pale-skinned, waifish young leading lady. Dark Shadows certainly isn’t going to rank among the director’s biggest successes (Sweeney Todd, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands), but for most of it’s running time it finds a way to entertain by showcasing a tale of an 18th Century vampire thrust into the 1970’s.

200 years after being buried alive by the witch (Eva Green) who cursed him and left him to rot, Barnabas Collins (Depp) is freed from his coffin by a group of construction workers making way for a McDonald’s. Confused by the nature of the new world, Barnabas makes his way to his ancestral home where he meets his descendants Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) and David (Gulliver McGrath).

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Neil Gaiman’s Stardust

  • Title: Stardust
  • IMDb: link

“There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire…The tale started, as many tales have started, in Wall.”
 

Stardust

Tristan (Charlie Cox) is your average leading character, a dreamer, a bit of a bumbler, from modest backgrounds, and in love with a girl (Sienna Miller) who doesn’t take him seriously.

To prove his love Tristan vows to go over the wall and bring back a falling star.  Though Tristan makes it over the wall his quest leads him where he least suspects for on the other side of the wall exists a magical realm which includes witches (Michelle Pfeiffer, Sarah Alexander, Joanna Scanlan, Melanie Hill), princes (Mark Strong, Jason Flemyng, Rupert Everett) with agendas of their own, and pirates (Robert De Niro, Dexter Fletcher).

Tristan’s goal is further impeded when the star itself turns out to be a sentient creature named Yvaine (Claire Danes) whose life is now in danger from those who wish to kill her and take her power.  Tristan’s journey home with Yvaine will teach him much about himself and the world, help him discover where his heart truly lies, and give him clues to his past and his destiny.

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