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Scent of a Woman
Great 66 Points 1992

One of the more charming scenes in movie history and Al Pacino’s roaring performance mark Scent of a Woman as a great movie. The super-charming scene is, of course, the serendipitous tango that Pacino performs with a winsome Gabrielle Anwar. Sneaking up out of nowhere, it seduces the audience…

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WikChip Video "If you're tangled up, just tango on."
Get on Up
Really Great 66 Points 2014

Get on Up joins the pantheon of great rock biopics, memorializing James Brown as a seminal rockstar whose power, pomp and circumstances paved the way for the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sly & the Family Stone, hip-hop and every other form of funkable & funkadelic music. Get on Up gets on…

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WikChip Video James Brown ✫ Please, Please, Pleas...
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 Drop
Very Good 66 Points 2014

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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WikChip Image Hardy & Schoenaerts play American.
Me and Orson We...
Barely OK 66 Points 2008

Me and Orson Welles is a disappointing, amateurish effort from the heretofore redoubtable Richard Linklater. Sadly the writing and acting weigh down whatever directing talents Linklater brought to the production. Ironically, for a movie that celebrates acting, the acting is just OK.

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WikChip Image Welles as Brutus in the Mercury's 'Ca...
Gone Girl
Great 66 Points 2014

Gone Girl stirs the pot, no doubt about that. Premiering amidst the NFL-stoked domestic violence uproar, this sordid thriller about a wife’s murder is akin to throwing gas on a fire. But never mind all that societal stuff, is it a good movie? Yes, a great one, albeit far from perfect.

The es…

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WikChip Image Smile! Oops, maybe not.
Elegy
Great 66 Points 2008

Ben Kingsley gets in much deeper than planned after seducing a much younger Penélope Cruz in Elegy. Isabel Coixet’s movie comes by its sexual fixations via pedigree: Phillip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal. Think of it as Portnoy’s Complaint, the When I’m 64 rendition – "Will you still nee…

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WikChip Video Ben Kingsley seduces Penélope Cruz
Johnny Dangerously
OK 66 Points 1984

Michael Keaton and a WTF cast couldn’t rescue Amy Heckerling’s mob parody Johnny Dangerously. About that cast, guys like Dick Butkus, Alan Hale Jr. and Ray Walston pop up in like three scenes each. What The Fuck?

Unfortunately the bad screenplay falls flat, with nary a joke that works.
*…

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WikChip Image They were cast for height.
Mistress America
Very Good 66 Points 2015

Mistress America mines the wandering desires of two young women in a fitful search for laughs and insight. It often succeeds, though not without wallowing in more than a little preciousness.

Greta Gerwig fans won’t mind, nor Noah Baumbach fans. Those partners in art and life cowrote it. Thu…

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WikChip Image Oddball group in an oddball movie
Minions
Pretty Bad 66 Points 2015

Minions aren’t just evil, they’re bad, or at least their movie is bad. It’s a children’s movie and I’m an adult, sure. But other kiddie pix work for parents as well as kids, and not just those from Pixar.

Part of the problem is that the villain is more ridiculous than scary and isn’t funny a…

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