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![]() Relaxed and delightfully deadpan, with several LOL moments, The Band’s Visit works as a perfectly pleasant comedy and as a signpost for how Israelis and Arabs can live together as neighbors. The movie uses a classic fish-out-of-water situation to achieve more than a few moments of inspired comi… |
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![]() Reverential movie, thy name is The Bicycle Thief. Long considered one of the greatest movies of all time, it still qualifies. Real people play the parts, none more affecting than seven year-old Enzo Staiola’s Bruno. The kid’s now my favorite boy in all of movie history. Bruno’s Dad hock…
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"They don't pay for repairs!" Love t...
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![]() Seminal movie, thy name is The Blue Angel, Der Blaue Engel in its native German. Josef von Sternberg was 36 when he paired unknown Marlene Dietrich with eminent Emil Jannings. Dietrich and von Sternberg rocketed straight to Hollywood. Jannings was left behind, kind of like in the story its…
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Falling In Love Again with Marlene
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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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![]() Father-son, mother-daughter, daughter-mother, Germany-Turkey: This movie grippingly explores the intersections of four relationships – three familial, one cultural. Superior to Babel and Crash, simil… |
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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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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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![]() Hollywood must be licking its chops to remake this Swedish hit. Chockablock with career-making roles, combining fashionable anti-capitalist politics with feminist blood-lust, and striking a crisply efficient thriller tone, it suffers only from a poor title, not that that matters given how huge t…
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Good trailer, great movie.
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![]() Stately to a fault, reverential to an extreme, The Grandmaster is kung fu cinema elevated to formal art. Stodginess aside, it no doubt lingers in the mind’s eye of hard core kung fu fans, let alone for the legendary Ip Man’s disciples. For the rest of us – focused on the Bruce Lee connection …
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Hey, isn't that little Bruce Lee?
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![]() The Intouchables clearly plays better in its native France than to we Americans. There it is a cultural sensation that bridges the divide between an immigrant underclass and wealthy patricians, the former living in bleak suburban projects, the latter in central Paris. Featuring big French sta…
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"You're going to buy that?!"
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