San Diego Reader

A Moment in Time None stars

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Friday Night Lights 0.0 stars

Pedantic pigskin story, based on the well-regarded nonfiction book by H.G. Bissinger, set in football-mad West Texas: the pressures, the twisted passions, the bitter pills, the life lessons. Billy Bob Thornton, who appears to take more than just the overbite ...

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Men in Black II 0.0 stars

The embodiment, the epitome, the acme of the "franchise picture," one of those brass rings that studio executives like to stack up on their lances. So perfect a one, in truth, that it would make more sense to cover the ...

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Orgazmo 0.0 stars

Lazy, lowbrow, bumpkinish comedy about a moronic Mormon missionary in Los Angeles who knocks on the door of a porno producer in mid-shoot, and is put in front of the camera as a Triple-X superhero specializing in interrupting coitus. Director-star ...

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Always 1.0 stars

Well, once in a while, maybe. Steven Spielberg's remake and update of Guy Named Joe, a WWII fantasy about the ghost of a recently deceased flyer who (unbeknown to anyone alive) tutors a neophyte flyer and even plays matchmaker between ...

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Bats 1.0 stars

And not just any ordinary old bats, but great big Texas-sized omnivorous bats. (Actually, laboratory-enhanced Indonesian imported bats.) Perfectly harmless s-f mutation stuff, apart from the stupefying conformance to convention. (And guess what's playing these days at the main-street bijou ...

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Where the Heart Is 0.0 stars

Southern-fried chick flick. Seventeen-year-old Novalee Nation, westbound and pregnant, is superstitious about fives (her ma ran out on the fifth of the month; it took fifty-five stitches to close her steak-knife wound; etc.), so when the cashier at an Oklahoma ...

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Trespass 0.0 stars

A violent drizzle of dung. Nicolas Cage is the diamond seller whose lavish home, wall safe, elegant wife (Nicole Kidman), and sex-bait daughter tempt stupid creeps to terrorize them. The villains are preening but instantly forgettable, exposing their crude backstories ...

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Mademoiselle Chambon 3.0 stars

Almost a French Brief Encounter, with (briefly) a train station. Quietly appealing Vincent Lindon is the construction worker with a fine wife (Aure Atika) and child, drawn to a lonely teacher. She (Sandrine Kiberlain) is what Westerns once called a ...

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Lisa 2.0 stars

Mischievous-teenager thriller, in the I Saw What You Did mode: mechanical, but well-built and well-operated, with gentle pressure on the gas pedal until finally flooring it at the climax. The perky teeny-boppers and the smiling psycho (known to the newspapers ...

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