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![]() A finely observed familial drama about siblings dealing with the death of their mother and the disposition of their museum-like childhood home, Summer Hours disdains standard movie drama. It’s edgeless, a film for two mature cohor…
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Mother and Daughter of Privilege
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![]() Great title, lame movie. Perhaps the cutting edge from 1972 was bound to appear silly four decades later, but this French farce sure hasn’t aged well. Desperate to offend, it mostly baffles and boggles. Is it too late to rescind its Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film? |
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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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![]() More a wartime romantic mystery than anything, A Secret is nonetheless as fine a Holocaust picture as you’ll find. Being French, it’s also a sensual love story, or two. Let’s start at the beginning even though the movie starts in the middle. A supremely athletic and thoroughly assimilated …
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Cécile De France: lithe object of desire
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![]() Triple helpings of Sophia Loren & Marcello Mastroianni make Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow a triplo trattare of sexy Italian comedy. 1963’s Best Foreign Language Oscar-winner is a primo classico movie. It’s like watching three 40-minute TV episodes performed by all-time great moviestars – a…
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Sophia turns Marcello into a puppy dog.
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![]() As essential to understanding China as Gone with the Wind is to understanding America, The Warlords brims with operatic history, passion, blood and beauty. GWTW romanticized the 1861 American Civil War; This 21st Century Chinese production romanticizes the – a – Chinese Civil War, also f…
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Slaughtering 4,000 men splits bloodbr...
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![]() François Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women hasn’t aged well. Perhaps that happens to every Lothario. It certainly seems to happen to movies about them. Nonetheless, this famous French film carries a certain fascination given that it was created by the legendary auteur behind "the Auteur Th…
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The Man Who Knew Women
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![]() Dangerously seductive, visually intoxicating, intellectually playful, Pauline at the Beach is très français. Bien sûr, very, very French. Éric Rohmer was past 60 when he made it, but his cinematic vision of an older man seducing a hot Parisian blonde proved he hadn’t lost touch with his inner…
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They also found time to talk.
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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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![]() This dazzling German movie shows the sociological antecedents of Nazism in ways both fresh and timeless. A penetrating societal examination unprecedented in its knowingness, it would be a landmark no matter which nation it examined. That it elucidates the generation of Germans who grew up to fo…
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Hand Kissing: Minimal Family Affection
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