Rambo

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The Story: Headband-sporting John Rambo decides to come out of hiding to free some Christians from a Burmese army encampment. The Lowdown: Violent, dumb, poorly made and pointlessly gory. It's exactly what you expect from a Rambo movie.

First Sunday

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The Story: Two small-time thieves decide to rob a church. Things become complicated when they learn that the money has already been stolen. The Lowdown: A comedy with a religious message that is refreshingly void of heavy-handedness, but never works due to lazy, muddled plotting and a distinct lack of laughs.

The Great Debaters

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The Story: Set during the 1930s, the film shows the struggles of an all-black debate team as they attempt to break racial boundaries and take on the Harvard debate team. The Lowdown: Your normal, run-of-the-mill uplifting sports flick -- except featuring debate instead of athletics -- which occasionally shows glimmers of attempting something more, but…

Hitman

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The Story: Based on the Hitman video-game series, a mysterious assassin is forced to go on the run after being double-crossed by his employers. The Lowdown: A trite plot, stiff acting and lackluster action make for one dull time at the movies, but what else do you expect from a video-game adaptation?

Bella

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The Story: A chef with a murky past tries to help out a young waitress who has just found out she is pregnant. The Lowdown: An occasionally slick little film about family and adoption that's just too unaffecting and slight to have the weightiness its going for.

Fred Claus

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The Story: Santa’s ne’er-do-well older brother Fred travels to the North Pole in order to help out for Christmas and scam $50,000 out of St. Nick. The Lowdown: An all-star cast can’t save this movie form being the usual Christmas turkey, this time hampered not only by a bloated running time, but a specious message…

Bee Movie

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The Story: A honey bee discovers the fact that humans have been stealing honey and selling it, and decides to sue in order to get it back. The Lowdown: Just another computer-animated comedy, but one completely devoid of laughs and ultimately one of the more tedious films to come out this year.

Reign of the Rejects

Playing David to the Asheville Film Festival’s Goliath for the second year in a row is the Asheville Rejects Film Festival. Presented by Asheville’s Agency Films, consisting of filmmakers John Bennett and Shawn Lukitsch (who also put on the traveling Hobo Film Festival earlier this year), the Rejects Film Festival is a departure from the […]

King of California

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The Story: A teenage girl gets stuck helping her bipolar father in his attempts to find a cache of Spanish doubloons he believes are buried underneath a Costco. The Lowdown: A sweet, honest, occasionally funny little movie that does nothing special, but avoids falling into the trap of being just another quirky indie flick, due…

The Final Season

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The Story: A high-school baseball team with a long tradition of excellence has one final season together before they will be assimilated into a larger school. The Lowdown: An adequate movie, but it's yet just another uplifting sports movie, nothing more, nothing less.

Feel the Noise

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The Story: After getting into trouble with the mob, a young rapper is forced by his mother to move to Puerto Rico to live with his estranged father. There he enters the world of reggaeton music. The Lowdown: A sloppy, clichéd, dull, humorless, low-budget movie that never seems to have any purpose or spark.