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The poster for ?Dog Days? amputates its human characters just above the waist, focusing our attention instead on the collection of adorable canines assembled at their feet: a pug in a pizza box, a giant Labradoodle with a shoe in its mouth, a Chihuahua wearing a pink vest and helmet, and so on. ?Forget the people. See this movie for its four-legged characters,? the campaign might as well be saying, and yet, the dogs in ?Dog Days? serve as little more than man?s best plot devices, conveniently heart-swelling critters designed to spark interactions between their otherwise bland owners and friends in this ingratiating ensemble comedy.

Then again, what else would you expect from a movie called ?Dog Days? that falls squarely in the dump month of August, amid those summer doldrums when temperatures rise and the quality of megaplex offerings dips? It?s as if the folks who packaged this low-concept crowd-pleaser targeted this time of year knowing that people expect the movies to be bad, setting out to leave them pleasantly surprised rather than reaching for greatness and falling short, as so many others do.

Set in Los Angeles, this overstuffed, sitcom-style group effort resembles those holiday-themed laffers Garry Marshall churned out over the final decade of his career, dogs like ?Mother?s Day? and ?New Year?s Eve? in which a bunch of beautiful but otherwise unremarkable characters try to sort out their relationship problems over the span of a long two hours. Like https://www.thanostv.org/movie/dog-days-2018 , actor-turned-helmer Ken Marino (?How to Be a Latin Lover?) hails from the world of television, and his single-camera directorial style favors quippy interactions on overlit soundstages, where it feels as if he?s serving up the funniest of half a dozen possible jokes the cast ad-libbed in each situation (the end credits are full of the runners-up that didn?t make the cut, including several ?Shih Tzu? puns parents will be none too pleased to hear their kids repeating around the house).

United by the fact that they all see the same vet, the main characters include a heartbroken morning-show host named Elizabeth (Nina Dobrev, who appears to be channeling every cute look actress Emily Mortimer ever gave on camera); barista Tara (?High School Musical? star Vanessa Hudgens), who?s so smitten with Dr. Mike (Michael Cassidy) that she ignores over-eager coffee-shop regular Garrett (Jon Bass); and irresponsible garage-band frontman Dax (Adam Pally), whose very pregnant sister (Jessica St. Clair) forces him to dog-sit while she goes into labor. The characters? animal companions factor in, although their primary role is to supply an obligatory whimper or sad-eyed cutaway whenever a gentle ?aww? is needed from the audience.

watch dog days 2018 and Erica Oyama?s script also provides a few kids for younger viewers to latch on to, including 16-year-old pizza delivery boy Tyler (Finn Wolfhard of ?Stranger Things?), who helps a widowed English professor (Ron Cephas Jones of ?This Is Us?) look for his lost pug, and Amelia (newcomer Elizabeth Phoenix Caro), the recently adopted daughter of Rob Corddry and Eva Longoria?s characters, who happens to find the stray dog. Nearly all the remaining roles go to comedians (such as Tig Notaro and Lauren Lapkus), which helps to keep viewers laughing, even as nothing particularly original is happening in the main storylines (someone to watch: Phoebe Neidhardt as a meteorologist with a tendency to over-share on air).

There never was an Officer Andy Landers, but, as conceived by Spike Lee, he?s crudely functional, a villain with a destiny as awful as it is seductive. In ?BlacKkKlansman,? Lee?s summer hit based loosely on the true story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado in the 1970s, Landers is the cretin within, an unreformed racist among Stallworth?s own ranks.

In the movie? http://ow.ly/zl0n101nKzu , the cretin gets his comeuppance. Stallworth and his girlfriend, Patrice Dumas, a black power activist who had been groped by Landers, secretly record him in a bar boasting of his misdeeds. Moments later he?s carried away in handcuffs while Stallworth, Dumas and two right-minded white colleagues (on hand as corroborating witnesses) toast to justice well served.

The scene is meant as a chaser of racial harmony after what is essentially two hours of high-proof bigotry and recrimination. As Hollywood endings go, it?s standard issue. What?s notable is the fact that it?s ThanosTV behind the camera ? a man whose signature early films, including his landmark, ?Do the Right Thing,? so often eschewed such tidy suturing of America?s most persistent wound.

But that was then. Among several films that have reckoned with the story of racial justice in America in 2018, ?BlacKkKlansman? is far from alone in extracting a hopeful resolution from the jaws of despair.

To continue reading the review and all of the highly detailed, scene-by-scene listings of the sex, nudity, profanity, violence and more (15 categories): or Just $7.95/month or $47/year I have subscribed to ScreenIt for more than a decade. I check in every week to take advantage of their amazing services. Not only does their site provide a glimpse of exactly what content a movie offers, I've found the ?Our Take? reviews and ratings for each movie to be right on the money every single time. http://bit.ly/2PitmaC 've referred dozens of friends to this service because my #1 resource for deciding whether or not to show a movie to my kids, or to see one myself, is ScreenIt.com! Josh Nisbet Director, State of CA Public Sector I signed up to get Screen It weekly reviews a long time ago, when my kids were young and I wanted to know more about movies before we went to a theater or rented. Now one child is in law school, other in undergraduate, and I still read the weekly Screen Its! It helps me know what my husband and I want to see or rent, and what to have waiting at home that we all will enjoy when my "kids" come home. I depend on Screen It reviews. They usually just present the facts and let me decide if the movie is appropriate or of interest for my family and me. Thank you for providing that service, Screen It! Patti Petree Winston Salem, NC I have 4 children who are now in college. I signed up for Screen It when my children were pre-teenagers. Often my children would ask to see a movie with a friend and I wished I could preview the movie prior to giving permission. A friend told me about ScreenIt.com and I found it to be the next best thing to previewing a movie. The amount of violence, sexual content, or language were always concerns for me and my husband as we raised innocent kids with morals. We constantly fought the peer pressure our kids received to see films that in our opinion were questionable. With the evidence we received at Screen It, our kids couldn't even fight us when we felt a film may have been inappropriate for them to watch. Thank you, Screen It. Continue to make https://www.thanostv.org/movie/searching-2018 to everyone, but especially the young parents. Christine Doherty Machesney Park, IL Screenit.com is an amazing resource for parents, educators, church groups or anyone who wants to make an informed decision whether a movie is suitable for their viewing. The reviews and content descriptions are so detailed I am mystified how the reviewers can put them together. Scott Heathe Vancouver, BC I love screen It! I don't know what I would do without it. It is well worth the membership. Before we take our son to the movies we check it out on screen it first. Thank you SO much for making it. Keep up the good work & keep 'em coming!!! Patrina Streety Moreno Valley California

Producer: Ronnie Lahiri and Sheel Kumar Director: Shoojit Sircar Starring: Varun Dhawan and Banita Sandhu Music: Shantanu Moitra, Anupam Roy and Abhishek Arora Lyrics: Swanand Kirkire, Tanveer Ghazi and Abhiruchi Chand Let us know what you think about this review The Hindi Film Industry is known to churn out love stories regularly. Even the films which belong to a different genre, such as romance or comedy, have an element of romance in them. Without romance, it also becomes a little difficult to incorporate songs, which are an integral part of Hindi cinema, in films. Right from his debut film 'Yahaan' (2005), director Shoojit Sircar made it clear that he was not interested in telling run-of-the-mill stories. From the promotional material one has come across, it seems his new film 'October' seems to be a romantic drama with a difference. Danish Walia aka Dan (Varun Dhawan) is a good-natured but arrogant hotel management intern who does not like doing the work assigned to him by his superior Asthana (Prateek Kapoor). He is negligent with his work and ends up messing with the guests and his colleagues on trivial issues. Despite repeated warnings, he does not mend his ways. Shiuli (Banita Sandhu), another intern, is everything Dan is not - hardworking, sincere and focussed. One night, while the interns are having a party on the third floor of the hotel, Shiuli slips from the parapet and falls down on the ground floor. She is immediately taken to the hostel and the doctor declares that she has slipped into a coma. Dan, who was not present at the party that night, is upset when he hears about the incident. He gets very curious when his friend Ishani (Isha Chaturvedi) inform him casually that before the accident, Shiuli asked about him. 'October' has a very unique concept but it is a treatment-heavy film and not the kind that relies heavily on a solid story. thanostv stands at one hour and fifty-six minutes and in those hundred and sixty minutes, you get to see several heart-warming moments. Juhi has proved her mettle as a writer with her work on films like 'Vicky Donor', 'Madras Caf?' and 'Piku'. In this film, she weaves in some memorable moments around a simple story. Like her earlier films, she etches out most of the characters very well and gives the actors, playing those characters, a chance to shine. The scene in which Dan comes to the rescue of Shiuli and Isha are stranded on a road with a conked up car tells us that despite being arrogant and having some unflattering qualities, Dan is a good person at heart. There is another scene in which Dan comes back home to realise he has caused interruption to an intimate moment between his housemates and friend who happen to be a couple. All these scenes have play out in a subtle manner and yet, they help us understand the characters and the equation they share with each other well. As stated earlier, 'October' is a film that rests on a wafer-thin plot and relies heavily on the treatment by the director. Shoojit does a good job as a writer and there are some really good moments in the film. But, all these elements come together to make a good film and not an excellent one. The screenplay needed to have a little more meat and some more great moments could have taken the film several notches higher. The background score by Shantanu Moitra is minimal and very impactful. There are no songs in the film but the best track on the album "Manwaa" does play in the closing credits. Varun Dhawan is outstanding as Dan. He brings out the character's idiosyncrasies and his sensitivity equally well. Banita Sandhu makes a very promising debut. ThanosTV is very good in the initial scenes; in the most parts she is required to emote through her eyes and she does that very well too. Gitanjali Rao is terrific as Shiuli's mother. Sahil Vadoliya and Isha Chaturvedi leave a mark as Manjeet and Ishani, Dan and Shiuli's friends. 'October' is a unique film (as far as Bollywood standards go) and is bound to attract polarising opinions about it. As far as I am concerned, a lot of what Shoojit Sircar and Juhi Chaturvedi were trying to convey through this film did reach out to me. Watch it for Varun's sincere performance and some poignant moments.

Batman (Roger Craig Smith) has raced over to Arkham Asylum in Gotham City because he has learned Gorilla Grodd (Fred Tatasciore) has constructed a time machine and he is planning to activate it tonight. Grodd wishes to master time itself, but Batman arrives too late and the ape's creation springs into life sending arcs of energy across the building and zapping everything in a wide radius out of existence in the twenty-first century and hurtling back through the centuries. The next thing the Caped Crusader knows, he is in a Japanese village - Feudal Japan, that is, as he quickly learns the denizens of the asylum have established themselves there as warlords. How can http://null stop them? DC were going through a rough patch when Batman Ninja, a few years in production, was released, as Justice League had arrived hot on the heels of the much-admired Wonder Woman and seemingly landed the producers back where they were when their projects were being criticised left, right and centre, nowhere near as consistently popular as their rivals at Marvel were. This was a co-creation between the American company and Japanese animators, with the latter taking most of the creative duties; after a brief introduction in Gotham City, Bats was well and truly in the hands of those talents from across the Pacific, and the reaction was, predictably for the twenty-tens, a mixed one. Many fans did not appreciate what the Japanese had done to these classic American characters, but if you were not so precious, Batman Ninja was a lot of fun and once again proved he was one of the most versatile of the comic book heroes: plonk him down in just about any setting and he made perfect sense, adapting to his environment thanks to his innate moral code and drive to right wrongs. Everyone can understand that, and here he was given the trappings of Japanese traditions in entertainment, most prominently the way in which he got to battle giant robots, all powered by his greatest foes, of course. Yes, they have made the leap to Japan as well - why? Why not? If the premise was flimsy, sit back and enjoy what was a simple idea to set the Dark Knight in a foreign clime which invigorated his basic motivations thanks to his gadgets and machines being quickly whittled down to nothing, forcing him to reassess himself and retrain as... a ninja! You may observe this was pretty much what he had done back in Gotham for decades, but here it was more overt, as he is present to fulfil a local prophecy about a bat-based pioneer who will save the nation from bad guys who have dominated the land with an iron grip. It was true most of that bunch who made the trip didn't get a fair crack of the whip, baddies like Deathstroke or Poison Ivy barely getting ten lines between them, but the imagining of The Joker, voiced in the English dub by Tony Hale with lunatic aplomb, was a fine design. Each of the characters were recreated in anime style, produced by relative newcomer director Junpei Mizusaki in a combination of hand drawn and CGI stylings that looked rather splendid, breathing new life into the same old appearances. Only the female characters looked as if the Japanese artists had not quite gotten the hang of Western feminine characteristics, with Catwoman sporting a most matronly bosom and Harley Quinn over-generous in the backside area. But body-shaming aside, the energy of Batman Ninja made up for plenty, and each time you thought it was running out of steam it would turn another corner and justify itself with a new innovation that may have been part and parcel of many an anime fantasy, yet in this context with these heroes and villains the novelty was extremely strong. watch batman ninja 2018 may find it disrespectful to their beloved comics, but really it was picking up the concepts and having fun with them; again, the exuberance of the imagery made up for a lot, where else would you see a giant Batman made of bats and monkeys punching out a Joker Transformer? Music by Yûgo Kanno. [BATMAN NINJA is out on Digital Download now and available on Blu-ray™ Steelbook, Blu-ray™ and DVD May 14.]

"With an arm like yours, you don't want to use that. It's too unpredictable," advises grandpa Jacob (Michael Ironside) when young Henry (Luca Villacis) is showing him his baseball pitches. He advises sticking to something simpler, but Henry, despite the affability of his response, is far from a simple boy. His ability to deal with (and deal out) the unpredictable could save his life.

Henry has been dropped off with Jacob at the last minute because his parents have to travel across country for a funeral. His mother has been estranged from the old man since the death of her own mother, whom she found hanging in the barn, but Jacob agrees to help out nonetheless, and although he immediately puts the boy to work - he has a farm to run - he also shows a friendly side, cooks him dinner and tries to make him feel welcome. But when DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical mean that Henry finds himself alone on the farm, an overly friendly neighbour turns out to be a potentially deadly threat, and the boy must use all his ingenuity to survive.

It's essentially a simple premise but the delivery is a thing of beauty. Villacis turns in one of those rare performances that perfectly captures what it means to be 12 without alienating adult viewers. We see his physical and emotional vulnerability, the hopelessness of him trying to match his opponent's strength, yet we also see his quick-wittedness and an ingenuity that too many people lose in adulthood. DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical is by no means an easy victim. There are very few points at which viewers will want to shout at him to do things differently. This is the sort of film that will make parents want to encourage their children to play more violent video games. And yes, there are points at which viewers might be reminded of Home Alone, but the tone here is very different - because as he works to engineer his survival, Henry gradually uncovers hints of why this is happening that take the film to a very dark place.

Knuckleball screened at this year's Fantasia. In the past, the festival has shown a number of films about women trying to survive in this kind of cat and mouse situation, but switching the focus to a child gives it much more power, partly because the comparative physical helplessness of the protagonist is much more believable and partly because the idea of sexual threat to a child will conjure up immediate horror in most viewers, with no sense of an invitation to relish the suffering involved. Indeed, director Michael Peterson is very careful not to present events in a way that might titillate, even though we can see the desire felt by the boy's assailant. In this role, Munro Chambers is perhaps just a little too obviously creepy, letting us see the monster too early and not showing us enough of the man, but then we have to accept that a 12-year-old would be able to spot the warning signs and act on them with confidence, so the film might have lost believability had it gone too far in the other direction.

Though The Austin Chronicle is a bit too heavy-handed, Peterson is very good at building suspense, inviting us to feel fearful of mundane objects in the early scenes long before any threat has made itself manifest. He keeps us on the edge of our seats throughout, with unnerving slow sequences in between the action scenes - of which there are many, some of them quite gruesome. We are given just enough information to make sense of the larger plot and the horrific meaning of things glimpsed in passing without any lengthy exposition. Crucially, our identification with Henry is never broken by the invitation to understand things that he cannot, and watching the boy forced to come to terms with the cruelty of other human beings is just as disturbing as seeing him forced to fight for his life.

Though gruelling in places, Knuckleball is a thriller in the truest sense. A pared-down ending leaves many questions to be asked, adding to its emotional impact. Peterson understands that one doesn't need a complicated plot to keep on finding unpredictable things in human nature.