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“Do you realize I haven’t kissed you in over an hour?” says Charlton Heston to Janet Leigh at the end of Touch of Evil’s famous opening scene, three and a half minutes of directorial perfection. One long tracking shot, it features close-ups leading to long shadows, followed by long shots of cho…
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Touch of Genius: the legendary opening
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Dennis Lehane took a short-story set in his characteristic Boston and expanded it into a screenplay set in Brooklyn. This works, great writer that he is, even if the story’s legs don’t so much cohere as cohabitate. The Drop won’t cohabitate as among his best with Mystic River…
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Hardy & Schoenaerts play American.
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High quality Scorsese with a bold faced cast operating at the top of their games, this movie misses serious greatness due to the ultimate absurdity of its plot and its numerous circoreality liberties. |
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High-powered action thrillers should all be this accomplished. Contraband smuggles a slyly clever plot, heavy-metal action and solid exploitation of an underexploited setting into theaters. A strong cast led by Mark Wahlberg is less a secret but no less an asset for this savvy crowd-pleaser….
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Merchant Marine Heavy-Metal Action
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Seven psychopaths, a Shih Tzu and an alcoholic screenwriter add up to a damn funny movie. Each psycho gets featured in a short within the larger movie, then gets additional screen-time based on how immediately expendable they are. As with horror-comedies, most are introduced just to get enterta…
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Walken's zenfully weird psycho
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The first great movie of 2013 is Gangster Squad. Oh great, what we’ve got here is a movie featuring a bunch of Hollywood Liberals gunning down loads of people with weapons they’d like to ban in real life, all in the name of entertainment. Only in America. OTOH, what’s great is a richly p…
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Bogie & Bacall? Gosling & Stone
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I avoided End of Watch when it came out in 2012, thinking it was just a steroidal TV Cop Show, moviestar Jake Gyllenhaal notwithstanding. Then David Ayer’s movie demanded attention, given BrianSez’s effusive review and Ayer’s recent mas…
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Cop Dogma in Outstanding Open Scene
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The Boondock Saints traffics in cliches, smoothly and high mindedly at first, then over-the-top, ultimately jumping the shark entirely. Fortunately it’s a hell of a lot of fun the whole way down. It tells the tall tale of twin brothers who rise from the Irish precincts of South Boston to kn…
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Dafoe: cliched cocky detective with a...
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Narco-gang depravity meets its match when things go military on the Mexican border in Sicario, Spanish for “hitman”. A semi-successful Emily Blunt rebels against this turn of events. Semi-successful? Her performance, not her rebellion, which is unsuccessful. Yet the movie is much more than semi…
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Coming Thru!!
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Choreography comes to car chases in Baby Driver. British director Edgar Wright’s benchmark blockbuster presents like Tarantino set to music. Nowhere to Run, Radar Love and Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up lead the 60s & 70s chestnuts that impart old-school cool into this new-school movie. Star…
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First Rate Musical Appreciation
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