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Audrey Hepburn is the spoon-full-of-sugar who makes the cultural imperialism go down in Funny Face. Stanley Donen’s musical – done Broadway style – is an intoxicating Vogue-tini, a Size 0 fashion fantasy. Richard Avedon famously created the opening titles, which are perfectly high fashion. …
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Avedon's timeless portrait of Hepburn
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12 Angry Men has lost its punch, coming across today as more tortured and melodramatic than taut and credible. Still, it’s a classic, enduring as a case study of group dynamics more than as a compelling drama. The well-known story follows a jury into and through their deliberations on a murd…
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12 Great Actors
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Ava Gardner plays a moviestar inspired by Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart a writer-director inspired by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in The Barefoot Contessa, Mankiewicz’s takedown of movie business amorality. A glamorous movie about showbiz mendacity, it is both brilliantly self-aware and gorgeous t…
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Classic Golden Age Scene
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Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn weren’t hardly done being the greatest couple in Hollywood history when they made Desk Set in 1957. Ten years later, they’d star as parents whose daughter brings home the very black Sydney Poitier as her fiancé in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner…
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The Greatest Demo of All Time
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Nina Simone’s name and presence had occasionally penetrated my consciousness and always piqued my interest. Happily, this well done documentary finally brought her consequential music and politics alive. Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, she was a unique and uniquely transfixing artist, fusin…
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Liz Garbus on her Nina Simone doc
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Frank Sinatra won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical as the womanizing nightclub singer in Pal Joey. Sandwiched between the glamorous Rita Hayworth and the luscious Kim Novak, he’s at his lounge-lizard best in this mid-century paean to pre-liberation sexual politics. It’s a wh…
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The Lady is a Tramp - Sinatra simmers
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Seriously funny and savagely smart, Hail, Caesar! represents another triumph for the Coen Brothers and their company of retro thespians. A satire of golden age Hollywood, it uses the Studio System as a canvas to mock targets across the political spectrum. Amazingly the Lefties take the worst o…
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Moviestar Cleans Up Well
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A moviestar who directs himself playing an iconic figure in a dramatic biopic has a fool for a leading-man. Don Cheadle provides proof of this as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead, following in the footsteps of Kevin Spacey, who stubbed his toe directing himself as Bobby Darin in the similarly flawe…
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Kind of Blue is Kind of Perfect
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Cults of personality hit peak absurdity when their object dies, as vividly satired in The Death of Stalin. Unfortunately, this political comedy is more smart than funny. Hence, its LOLs are few and far between. Stalin funny? Yeah, even though he stands nearly alone in megalomaniacal evil, be…
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The Banality of Evil, Satired
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Showbiz legends Marilyn Monroe, Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh & Arthur Miller give My Week with Marilyn more sizzle than it deserves. A cinematic goddess descends to live amongst the hoi polloi and everyone loses their minds, the men mostly, the women indirectly through their men. Marilyn’s al…
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Marilyn visits Eton, boys go crazy.
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