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![]() Sharp satire, winning performances and terrific visuals make Sky High a treat for we grownups, and high schoolers too. Turns out this treat doesn’t get stale, as revisiting it a dozen years after its premiere proved. First of all, Sky High is a Kurt Russell movie. Disney’s greatest male le…
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It all becomes clear...
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![]() 12 Strong is no run-of-the-mill war movie, to be valued on its moral complexity and clever comebacks. No, 12 Strong is morally simple and often wooden, making it rather unfashionable in our morally confused era. Of course, we also live in the Islamist Era, sharing God’s Earth with a medieval …
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Cool details about the real Horse Sol...
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![]() Relaxed and delightfully deadpan, with several LOL moments, The Band’s Visit works as a perfectly pleasant comedy and as a signpost for how Israelis and Arabs can live together as neighbors. The movie uses a classic fish-out-of-water situation to achieve more than a few moments of inspired comi… |
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![]() Perfect music, emotionally loaded material and an attractive production can’t rescue this manipulative 9/11 movie’s cliche characters. Like outcasts from writer-director Mike Binder’s Mind of a Married Man show and an Adam Sandler arrested-development movie, they never go beyond their essentia…
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Aspirational Inspiration for the Movie
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![]() Oliver Stone loves making drug-trade movies, war movies and especially drug war movies. So a California drug war makes an ideal subject for his obsessions. Savages – the title flaunts its nihilistic appeal – fills the bill. Speaking of flaunting, Stone’s movie sports rich ingredients but nev…
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Salma Hayek -- Cleopatra Kingpin
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![]() The Way, Way Back is the perfect summer movie from this Summer of `13. It opens and closes with a painfully awkward teen in the late, lamented way-way-back of a 1970 Buick Estate Station Wagon. In between he spends a life-changing summer at the beach house of his mom’s asshole boyfriend, pl…
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Awkward boy meets way, way cool girl
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![]() A three hanky weeper of the best kind – uplifting and funny. I was fortunate to watch it in the darkened cabin of an overnight flight to London, otherwise the tears streaming down my face would have been noticeable to others. But a good man-cry …
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Momma's Boy: The real Michael Oher
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![]() A freight train full of toxic chemicals gets loose, threatening disaster unless two blue collar railmen can bring it under control. The result is bravura big screen entertainment, old school style: nothing supernatural, adults behaving like adults, lots of moviestar charisma. This instant cla…
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Denzel & Pine: Moviestars, all aboard!
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![]() Anybody seen a golden Hollywood crown? Tom Hanks lost his by directing, starring in and co-writing this disappointing dramedy. Notwithstanding Hanks having Hanks – the most likable leading man this side of Jimmy Stewart – and a resonant au courant theme, Larry Crowne barely rises to second ra…
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Hanks in a red shirt sells the movie.
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![]() All the LOL moments are in the trailers. Still, Ashton and Cameron are likable, hot, self-deprecatingly funny, and have more than a smidgen of chemistry together, so the movie is a bit better than OK. |