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Visually scintillating, musically avant-garde, dramatically turgid: This biopic of two cultural giants goes down like Brussels sprouts instead of foie gras. IOW, it takes effort to work through the two hour running time, when it should feel like savoring a rich delicacy. Pity, since Coco & Igor…
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Great design barely trumps turgid drama.
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Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines – as the phrase went back in the day. Magnificent indeed, but also jaded, troubled, and struggling with the fact that so little of them ever make it through WWI sotries alive. Aces High takes a soft-pedal (well, soft for a 70’s movie anyway) look a… |
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Hard not to think of The Wind Rises as The Zero Movie, as it’s about the engineer who designed Imperial Japan’s lethal fighter – the dreaded Japanese Zero. Instead, Jirô Horikoshi gets painted in hagiographic terms in a movie nominated this year for an Oscar and a Golden Globe: Best Animate…
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Flights of Fancy in a Fatally Flawed ...
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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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Vincent van Gogh deserves a great biopic. At Eternity’s Gate isn’t it, not even close. Frequent screen blackouts and repeated dialogue are just two flaws. At Eternity’s Gate has several more, including scenery that isn’t beautiful until Van Gogh makes it so. Yet its worst flaw is to waste …
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Nice Scene
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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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Brando’s feral sexuality reached its nihilistic extreme in Last Tango in Paris, a high-toned porno distinguished then for its daring explicitness and now as a period piece of iconic 70s indulgence. The minimalistic story about a grief stricken older man conducting an anonymous sexual maratho…
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Nihilistic Chic: Cover Boy Brando
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The Crimes of Grindelwald is also The Parade of Obscurities, so convoluted are its developments over 2¼ hours. Unlike other J.K. Rowling movies, which have generally been discernible despite their depth, Fantastic Beasts 2 makes even the convoluted Avengers: Age of Ultron… |
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A story of brothers ripped apart by revolution should be better than the formulaic The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Cloaked in the emerald charm of Ireland, yet curiously unengaging, it’s more socialist screed about the Irish republican revolution than ripping good yarn. The Irish revolutio…
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Brothers, close as can be, ripped apart
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A behind-the-scenes peek at high fashion, huge egos and what’s left of La Dolce Vita, this documentary of superstar designer Valentino works as a modest entertainment, but mostly serves as a character study of a monstrously successful artistic genius and his promotional alter ego. For those in…
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Valentino Visions in White
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