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Noomi Rapace returns as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in this second movie of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy novels. A feminist Jason Bourne, her Lisbeth Salander operates with deadly derring do on-the-net, off-the-grid and in the grills of rapists. Wow. Even a red blooded dude like me…
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Fast moving, hard hitting, niftily pl...
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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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![]() 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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![]() More than your ordinary police procedural, this affecting Argentine import includes a decidedly grown-up office romance & insight into Perón’s Argentina. Veteran Law & Order director Juan José Campanella deserves his Best Foreign Language Oscar for an &1 if nothing else.1 His film’s two…
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Argentine Law & Order Writ Large
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![]() Rock I ran. Whoops, make that Rock Iran, as in the music of rebellion from the theocratically oppressed country threatening nuclear Armageddon. This revolutionary paradox makes Persian Cats the most important political movie of the year. A slice-of-life take on the underground rock music sce…
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Revolution Rock: Persian Cats trailer
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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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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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![]() 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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![]() The hell of war gets chronicled as never before in this stylistic and thematic breakthrough of a movie. Animated though vividly realistic, this grunt’s-eye view of war and its post-traumatic aftermath stands as a postmodern masterpiece, taking its place alongside fictional accounts like "Apocaly…
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Golden Globe acceptance by Ari Folman
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