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![]() Deadly funny, Young Adult expertly skewers shallow Americana, especially the self-absorbed who drift through the sports bars, Hampton Inns and chain stores that delineate it. Nearly every scene tickles. Many are provocatively LOL, especially effective on those of us with a taste for really sm…
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Dolled Up & On The Prowl
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![]() Wow. Few contemporary dramas are as fully realized, involving and insightful as the unfortunately titled Margaret. Title aside, the movie’s other negative is a two and a half hour running time, and that’s for the version available from iTunes and Amazon. Apparently there’s also a three hour …
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Pacquin acting out. Damon allowing it.
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![]() The battles of 1st Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville get brought to terribly glorious life in this opening salvo of a planned Civil War trilogy. Funded by a son of the South, Gods and Generals focuses on sympathetic Confederate heroes Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. It could …
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One of the signal moments in US history.
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![]() Nicole Kidman goes to her estranged sister’s wedding. Jennifer Jason Leigh, said brilliant and beautiful sister, is marrying Jack Black, a buffoon who spectacularly overestimates himself. Classic Jack Black. Speaking of spectacular, Kidman’s Margot is a spectacularly successful fiction write…
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Who says you can't go home again?
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![]() Heard of the Bondurant School of Driving? Lawless is the Bondurant school of bootlegging, V8 Fords careening along dirt roads included. Indeed, the story of a legendary family of moonshiners from Western Virginia – the Bondurants – gets a monumental telling in this powerfully assured and ente…
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Guy Pearce's dandy of a villain
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![]() Looper is one of the most satisfying movies of the year. An outstanding action picture, a mind-bending time-travel yarn and a charismatic moviestar showcase, it’s exciting, thought provoking and often damn funny. Writer-director Rian Johnson must be a very hot commodity in Hollywood now based…
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Charismatic: Bruce's best role in years
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![]() Death of a Salesman? Death of Three Salesmen, figuratively anyway. Glengarry Glen Ross famously pits salesmen against each other in a ghoulish contest where the winner gets a Cadillac, the runner-up a set of steak knives and everyone else gets fired — the motivation of the damned. Performe…
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"Second Prize - a Set of Steak Knives"
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![]() Zero Dark Thirty tells the truthy tale of the deadly hunt for Osama bin Laden, making it one of the most potent political movies of all time. The certain reverberations are hard to predict. Wikileaks? Wikiflick. It starts with a dark screen, then a title card. September 11, 2001. Scre…
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Toe-to-toe over how to find bin Laden
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![]() De Niro and Norton’s moviestar masterclass combined with austerely beautiful filmmaking elevates a formulaic story that trades heavily in caricature. Often darkly funny, occasionally LOL so, Stone surmounts its insufficient title by proving itself an involving experience.
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Moviestar Masterclass: De Niro & Norton
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![]() Spectacular calamity followed by impressive vengeance makes Olympus Has Fallen an amply satisfying cinematic experience. So what if it’s jingoism. It’s extremely well executed jingoism, by jingo! Patriotic action-movie fans – like me – happen to like this sort of button-pushing entertainment…
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Stunts and FX make the movie.
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