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![]() France et le Québec endured Jacques Mesrine’s spectacular 1960s and 70s criminal career, anointing him a media sensation in the process. The first half of this too-big-for-a-single-movie story gets told in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the concluding chapters in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1:…
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Anti-hero: "Nobody kills me until I s...
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![]() The French sure know how to concoct clever romantic comedies. If only the execution were up to snuff, Heartbreaker would be a classic of the genre. Oh bien, it screams for an American remake anyway. Hollywood simply has to cast their version better for a monster hit. Heartbreaker mask…
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Romantic Comedy, French Flair
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![]() The Lisbeth Salander trilogy ends with a thud in Hornet’s Nest. Not a bang or a blaze: those would require more than a stately pace and less dependence on revealed secrets. Slower than the second, which was less kinetic than the first, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest serves only to cl…
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Famous Goth Agent goes to Trial
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![]() Point Blank – a thriller on rails – pauses briefly in 84 minutes of run time, but only briefly. Otherwise it propels forward, crazed yet plausible in the moment. The big picture is insane, of course. A male nurse and his gorgeous wife revel in the impending birth of their first child, no…
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The movie moves just as fast as the t...
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![]() French musical sensation Serge Gainsbourg explains himself in this surreal biopic. Largely unknown here in America, Gainsbourg was a cross between Dylan, Sinatra and Leonard Cohen in France. The women he squired – including Brigitte Bardot during her superstar heyday – comprise a good part of h…
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Musician's Beauty: Gainsbourg & Bardot
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![]() Ip Man 2 was supposed to focus on the legendary Grandmaster’s relationship with Bruce Lee, his most famous disciple. But Lee’s descendants didn’t go along with the plan, so the movie ends up being about Ip Man’s post-war struggles to establish Wing Chun kung fu in colonial Hong Kong. The resul…
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Ip Man teaches Wing Chun kung fu
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Penélope Cruz plays the object of desire for two powerful men, a handsome filmmaker and a rapacious businessman, in Broken Embraces. Hmm, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest creation includes more than a little wish fulfillment, doesn’t it: He projects himself as the virile lover of his muse and conjures…
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Kept Woman on the Verge of a Breakdown
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![]() “Dogtooth” is a curiously unappealing title, even given this celebrated movie’s self-conscious weirdness. Somehow Dogtooth made my Gotta View List, so I ultimately got around to viewing it. What a mistake. It tells the story of a wealthy and robotic Greek family who use code for common wor…
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Sex that is unsexy & unthreatening
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![]() Turns out the French Resistance wasn’t entirely French, with the Nazis dubbing one largely foreign group The Army of Crime. More legitimately known as the Manouchian Group, they were spectacularly effective in metro Paris during 1943, a feat inadvertently highlighted by the Nazi propaganda pos…
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"Liberators?" Yes, as a matter of fact.
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![]() A new addition to the canon of great mafia movies, Gomorra entertainingly details the mundane savagery and sociopathic activities of Italy’s oldest organized crime organization. Darkly funny, Gomorra brings to life Roberto Saviano’s hugely important book…
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Camorra Country: Cancer @ the heart o...
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