The World's End

3 1/2 out of 4 stars

From the warped and hilarious minds of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, The World's End is a belly full of beer, laughs and blue blooded robots. Gary King (Pegg in pitch perfect hilarity) is a forty-something lush who reunites his four childhood friends (Nick Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan) to go on a pub crawl that they did twenty years ago. Along their boozy quest from bar to bar, an unknown species of robots causes the group into fending for their lives from a fate worse than a New Year's Day hangover. The World's End is a hilarious clash of comedy and science fiction; think of it as Withnail and I meets Re-Animator.

Pegg and Wright's witty dialogue and unforgettable one-liners are as funny as their two previous films (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz), as well as turning the English countryside into an Orwellian war zone with humor and paranoia. Beyond the in-your-face action and liver corroding laughter is a poignant story about friendship and being stuck in the past. Unlike the crocodile tears shed from previous hapless comedies about middle age, like Grown Ups 2 and This is 40, Pegg and company deliver laughs about the follies of youth in the midst of impending doom brought on by an army of blue-blooded robots. Do the robots personify British aristocracy saturating the working class, or do they represent the desire to indulge in the days of lager and roses before confronting the harsh realities of aging? In any case, The World's End is an endless amount of fun that will leave you laughing until last orders.

Karen Black (1939-2013)

Karen Black, Academy-award nominated actress and siren of the late-sixties and seventies, died Thursday after a long struggle with cancer. Known for her come-hither looks and warmhearted roles,  the Illinois-native studied acting under Lee Strasberg, the iconic method acting teacher whose list of students included James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino. During the mid-sixties, she appeared on off-Broadway productions before getting recognized by Francis Ford Coppola and made her film debut in his 1966 film, You're a Big Boy Now. In 1969, she appeared as a New Orleans prostitute opposite Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in the counter-cultural masterpiece, Easy Rider.

In 1970, she earned a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the ditzy, yet loyal, Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces and won a second Golden Globe for her performance in Jack Clayton's adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Throughout the Seventies, Black worked with the decade's most sought-after filmmakers like Robert Altman, John Schlesinger and Alfred Hitchcock. By the Eighties, the films of the counterculture were overshadowed by blockbusters and Black's career faded to B-movie obscurity. Her career and contribution to the era penned by Peter Biskind as the era of "Easy Riders and Raging Bulls" will be remembered by many. She is survived by her husband Stephen Eckelberry and two children.