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Funny Face
Great 66 Points 1957

Audrey Hepburn is the spoon-full-of-sugar who makes the cultural imperialism go down in Funny Face. Stanley Donen’s musical – done Broadway style – is an intoxicating Vogue-tini, a Size 0 fashion fantasy.

Richard Avedon famously created the opening titles, which are perfectly high fashion. …

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WikChip Image Avedon's timeless portrait of Hepburn
The Barefoot Co...
Great 66 Points 1954

Ava Gardner plays a moviestar inspired by Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart a writer-director inspired by Joseph L. Mankiewicz in The Barefoot Contessa, Mankiewicz’s takedown of movie business amorality. A glamorous movie about showbiz mendacity, it is both brilliantly self-aware and gorgeous t…

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WikChip Video Classic Golden Age Scene
Desk Set
Great 66 Points 1957

Spencer Tracy & Katharine Hepburn weren’t hardly done being the greatest couple in Hollywood history when they made Desk Set in 1957. Ten years later, they’d star as parents whose daughter brings home the very black Sydney Poitier as her fiancé in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner

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WikChip Video The Greatest Demo of All Time
What Happened, ...
Great 66 Points 2015

Nina Simone’s name and presence had occasionally penetrated my consciousness and always piqued my interest. Happily, this well done documentary finally brought her consequential music and politics alive.

Dubbed the High Priestess of Soul, she was a unique and uniquely transfixing artist, fusin…

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WikChip Video Liz Garbus on her Nina Simone doc
Pal Joey
Great 66 Points 1957

Frank Sinatra won a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical as the womanizing nightclub singer in Pal Joey. Sandwiched between the glamorous Rita Hayworth and the luscious Kim Novak, he’s at his lounge-lizard best in this mid-century paean to pre-liberation sexual politics. It’s a wh…

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WikChip Video The Lady is a Tramp - Sinatra simmers
The Finest Hours
Great 83 Points 2016

Real romance precedes real heroism in The Finest Hours. A retro historical drama and Disnefied true-story of the greatest rescue in Coast Guard history, its tone is as extremely earnest as its story is death-defying.

The romance between Bernie & Miriam Webber defines almost the entire first …

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WikChip Video 36 Men in a 36 Foot Boar
The Founder
Great 83 Points 2016

The Founder is about the creation of McDonalds, if not necessarily about the founders of McDonalds. Those would be the McDonald brothers, not Ray Kroc, the salesman who turned their creation into a world-changing commercial juggernaut. Michael Keaton dominates this movie, just as Kroc did the M…

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WikChip Video Backstory of The Founder
Rocketman
Great 83 Points 2019

“The bitch is back” in this rockstar revenge pic. Rockumentary in spirit and phantasmagoric in production, Rocketman is a largely satisfying dip in the deep well of Elton John’s bottomless self-regard.

Studded with bits of fantasy, Rocketman is more Across the Universe

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To Catch a Thief
Very Good 66 Points 1955

Before It Takes a Thief there was To Catch a Thief, an exercise in high style, sumptuous settings and 1950s thrills, featuring the most glamorous couple in Silver Screen history.

Cary Grant & Grace Kelly are über attractive as a rich heiress and a cat burglar … who was also a hero of the…

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WikChip Image The most glamorous couple, ever?
Hollywoodland
Very Good 66 Points 2006

For grown fans of the original Superman TV show, Hollywoodland soothes a longstanding itch. Engagingly acted and well produced, this whodunnit joins the pantheon of high quality Hollywood murder mysteries.

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