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Apocalypto
Great 66 Points 2006

Half anthropological study, half snuff film, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is fascinating and often breathtaking. Oh yeah, it’s also gratuitously violent, giving full reign to its creator’s sick taste for hand-to-hand savagery.

Mad Mel’s movie canvases a panoply of Mayan curiosities: human sacrif…

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WikChip Image Zero Wolf: Holcane Warrior captain
The Man Who Lov...
OK 66 Points 1977

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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WikChip Image The Man Who Knew Women
A Secret
Really Great 66 Points 2007

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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WikChip Image Cécile De France: lithe object of desire
The Girl with t...
Great 66 Points 2010

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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WikChip Video Good trailer, great movie.
The Girl Who Pl...
Very Good 66 Points 2010

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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WikChip Video Fast moving, hard hitting, niftily pl...
The Girl Who Ki...
OK 66 Points 2010

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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WikChip Image Famous Goth Agent goes to Trial
NO
Great 66 Points 2013

So big it came down to YES or NO. A national referendum on authoritarian rule, YES or NO?

NO won, a shock to Chile, many Latinos and the world. Turns out that pop was the way to nail the weasel. The weasel was General Augusto Pinochet, the strongman who had fixed the economy but crushed diss…

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WikChip Video Selling Liberation Like Toothpaste
Gainsbourg: A H...
Good 66 Points 2010

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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WikChip Image Musician's Beauty: Gainsbourg & Bardot
Summer Hours
Great 66 Points 2008

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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WikChip Image Mother and Daughter of Privilege
The Blue Angel
Really Great 66 Points 1930

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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WikChip Video Falling In Love Again with Marlene