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Young Adult

“Imagine still living in Mercury!” Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), the beautiful 37-year-old central character in the corrosive comedy Young Adult, says disparagingly to a girlfriend. They’re sitting in Minneapolis, which is the movie’s cosmopolitan antithesis to Mercury’s small-town stultification. Mavis escaped from the town to a failed marriage and a career ghostwriting a series of teen-girl novels.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

When Robert Downey Jr. first appeared in 2009 as a leaner, meaner Sherlock Holmes, I remarked that I didn’t see anything wrong with tweaking the character a bit: Like his Victorian comrade Count Dracula, the character of Holmes has been redone so many times that a fresh approach seems necessary if you’re going to do him at all. Still, you have to retain some of the germ of Arthur Conan Doyle’s much-loved detective, and if the previous movie strained that connection, this sequel almost loses it entirely: He’s closer to Jack Sparrow than Basil Rathbone.



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