Movie Reviews: Our Brand is Crisis, Burnt, Truth | Buzz Blog
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Movie Reviews: Our Brand is Crisis, Burnt, Truth

Also: The Assassin, The Keeping Room

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Head towards an Election Day with a couple of election-themed movies, see Bradley Cooper be the hottest thing in a kitchen, or hit the art houses for period-piece dramas.
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In Burnt, Bradley Cooper (pictured) plays a troubled chef trying to get his groove back, but a sense of the chaos in restaurant kitchens can't overcome the general laziness of the script. The Keeping Room explores a daring premise in its story of three women on a Southern farm in 1865 trying to fend off Union soldiers, but gets bogged down in thesis-statement speeches. Hou Hsiao-Hsien crafts stunning compositions for The Assassin, though it's still hard not to wish that he did more with the central story of an assassin tasked with killing a man she was once going to marry.

Eric D. Snider wishes Our Brand is Crisis had been more willing to take its "American cutthroat politics exported to Bolivia" premise and given it more real satirical punch.

In this week's feature review, Truth seems to think that the equivalent of shouting its title repeatedly makes up for its refusal to explore the consequences of sloppy journalism.

Also opening this week, but not reviewed are two Halloween-appropriate horror titles: Teenagers try to use their skills to save the world in Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, and a human, zombie and vampire team up to battle an alien invasion in Freaks of Nature.