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![]() Liz Taylor’s sultry star power makes BUtterfield 8 an enduring curiosity, now more legendary than ever in the wake of her death. A sophisticated story about sexual motives makes it a quality film. La Liz plays a sometime model who cavorts with wealthy married men until falling for one in pa…
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Iconic Liz: Just ask Camille Paglia
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![]() Perfect credits lead to a fitfully entertaining movie about some monumentally smug people in Heartburn. Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson – in his prime – lead the credits. The great Mike Nichols directs, fifteen years after directing Nicholson in the scandalous Carnal Knowledge…
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Jack in his prime
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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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![]() 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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![]() True stories bear a burden when they get turned into movies. Stay true to the story and the movie will be less than spectacular. Punch it up and get accused of selling out. Lay the Favorite falls prey to the former as it recounts a real young woman’s underground education. The indomitable…
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Formidable Wife: Catherine's Tulip
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![]() A tremendous cast makes short work of an overwrought but underdone story in Broken City. Crowe, Wahlberg and Zeta-Jones are the single-namers, and Kyle Chandler should be. They’re not all. The strong supporting cast includes Barry Pepper, luscious Natalie Martinez and engaging newcomer Britn…
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Katherine Zeta-Jones' star turn
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![]() Tangled murder mystery, 2013 psychiatric variety, thy name is Side Effects. Shrink meds have become a defining phenomena of our therapeutic age, yet brain doctors lack diagnostics beyond human observation. Still. No imaging, no blood tests but for some side-effects. Side-effects plus murder …
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There she is, all happy. Great acting.
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![]() A Late Quartet is a pleasant surprise, a little movie getting its main airplay nowadays at 30,000 feet. Tune in when it comes on if you appreciate intelligent interpersonal drama, with relatable adults working through the consequences of a lifetime of decisions, mistakes and challenges. Four …
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Colleagues, Family, Lovers: Complicated
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![]() A big, bawdy brouhaha of a movie, David O. Russell’s followup to Silver Linings Playbook never fails to entertain, especially in recreating the Seventies. Yet it never coheres to a point. It’s all pointless seems to be its point. Silver Linings Playbook…
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JLaw's nut nukes nuke, blames husband.
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