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Everybody’s damaged in Please Give. Most are awful, some sweet, all adrift. Misanthropic, it generates frequent laughs at the expense of these modern Manhattanites. Think a more seriously inclined Seinfeld – from the feminine side. Not that …
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Big sis Amanda Peet: Skin deep beauty
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![]() Morning TV seduces Rachel McAdams’ plucky heroine more than a McDreamy boyfriend in this love letter to the bright lights of mainstream media. Good thing, since some well crafted career comedy makes Morning Glory reasonably entertaining to men, even if its target audience is aspiring women loo…
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Harrison Ford: gravitas on demand.
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![]() It’s a romantic thriller. No wait, it’s a lame sorta scifi story that never really adds up. Pity, because the strong cast works well, with romantic leads Matt Damon and Emily Blunt demonstrating real chemistry. How does a misfire like The Adjustment Bureau get made? You can just see the…
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![]() A designer drug leads to designer suits, a designer lifestyle, an inevitable come-down, and then mystery. Is that limitless? Perhaps, though the title Limitless is harder to get your mind around than the actual movie. A classic story of ambition unfairly achieved – sheathed in pharmaceutic…
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Old Star & New Star: De Niro & Cooper
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![]() Lots of pretty people delivering razor sharp comedy atop an idiotic premise makes for a very good movie. The central conceit of Our Idiot Brother – Paul Rudd’s absurdly guileless fool, a.k.a. the Idiot Brother – gets just this side of tedious however. Fortunately the whole thing is more than a…
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Elizabeth Banks: Uptown Gorgeous
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![]() The NY Times’ take on the banking crisis endgame gets reenacted in this made-for-HBO docudrama. Notwithstanding the Big Lie told in the middle, the movie otherwise seems to competently essay the mechanics of the fall of Lehman Brothers, AIG and the imposition of TARP. The Big Lie comes when t…
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Tim Geithner: Mr. Too-Big-To-Fail him...
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![]() Wall Street gets stripped bare in this brilliantly depressing takedown of überleveraged trading houses, what used to be known as Investment Banks. An acting tour de force about the fall of a Lehman-like firm, Margin Call plays like a Wall Street Glengarry Glen Ross…
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Stanley Tucci's dissed risk manager
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![]() Not especially funny or thrilling, Tower Heist does offer a proven cast of name actors and a topical story. In fairness, I viewed it on an airliner seatback screen. While seeing it in the theater is no longer an option, viewing it on a big flatscreen in a home theater may have stimulated a hi…
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More Murphy please, at least in this ...
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![]() The “Jewish Mark Twain” reanimates in this engaging and illuminating biography. Why the Yiddish Twain? Because the two contemporaries were known by pen names and pioneered writing about regular people in vernacular language. However, only Sholem Aleichem has a huge musical hit to his name. …
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Biggest Funeral in NYC History
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![]() Clever and cliched at the same time, Man on a Ledge generates sufficient thrills to pass the time but not enough to seek it out. Sam Worthington plays a framed cop who concocts an elaborate stunt to prove his innocence. Per the title, he threatens to jump from a hotel ledge in midtown Manha…
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Beauty and the Mook
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