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Marshall
Great 66 Points 2017

The American hero who almost single-handedly defeated institutional racism personified his unique first name. Lots of Marshalls, just one Thurgood, which is why Marshall is a poor title for this stirring biopic. OTOH, Thurgood sounds like a thoroughly good historical drama about Thurgood Mars…

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WikChip Video Thurgood Marshall, American action hero
Joy
Great 83 Points 2015

Joy became more about Jennifer Lawrence than about Joy Mangano, the subject of this imaginative biopic. Even more, it became about JLaw reuniting with Bradley Cooper & Robert De Niro in a David O. Russell movie. Coming just three years after their Silver Linings Playbook

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WikChip Video The real Joy talks about the movie Joy.
Darkest Hour
Great 83 Points 2017

Instead of The King’s Speech, Darkest Hour is The Prime Minister’s Speeches, Churchill’s speeches at the outset of WWII. It fixates on Sir Winston’s galvanizing addresses to Parliament and the British people during the darkest hour for the UK, and for all of civilization. His words ignited …

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WikChip Video Even the trailer is stirring!
Hostiles
Great 83 Points 2017

The American Indian Wars were mostly over by 1892. Bad blood ran deep, with bands of crazed killers roaming the land, as other combatants tried to move on with life after wartime. Writer-director Scott Cooper adroitly uses this brutal and beautiful milieu for a piercing story about a cavalry capt…

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Gold
Great 83 Points 2016

Matthew McConaughey rode the tiger (yet again) in the under-titled Gold, the truthy tale of a hard-living, third-gen miner who never ever gives up hope. This Weinstein Company release revels in peeping at the rise, fall, rise and fall of a quasi-rapacious capitalist kook. From the Left, revenge…

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WikChip Image Gold digger closes in on paydirt
Kill the Irishman
Great 83 Points 2011

Who knew there was another only-in-America mobster story ideally suited for a biographical crime movie? Kill the Irishman is that movie and Danny Greene is the mobster it brings to life, a self-made man who rose to run a large swath of the Cleveland rackets in the Seventies. It’s a rich story, …

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WikChip Video Smart, Perspicacious, Controlled, Brutal
White Boy Rick
Great 66 Points 2018

White Boy Rick is more than a primo Matthew McConaughey movie, though it is definitely one of those. It is a darkly funny – basically true – tale of a family gone wrong in a city gone hella wrong, 1980s Detroit.

Yann Demange’s film is a grim sociological examination, proctological in its pen…

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WikChip Video Matthew McConaughey on Rooster McCona...
The Old Man & t...
Great 66 Points 2018

Wonderfully droll and resolutely deadpan, The Old Man & the Gun strikes gold portraying a congenital thief through his long misspent life. Charming from the jump, the Old Man is played by Robert Redford, Mr. Maximum Moviestar at his octogenarian best, still charming and virile after six decades…

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WikChip Video Jackson C. Frank's Blues Run The Game
East of Eden
Great 66 Points 1955

Great American Movies based on Great American Novels reveal new insights at increasingly greater remove. Dating from 1955 and set in 1917, East of Eden is greatly insightful about the changes in America in the near half century between when it was set and made, and the half century plus between…

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WikChip Video James Dean, James Dean, James Dean!
Rocketman
Great 83 Points 2019

“The bitch is back” in this rockstar revenge pic. Rockumentary in spirit and phantasmagoric in production, Rocketman is a largely satisfying dip in the deep well of Elton John’s bottomless self-regard.

Studded with bits of fantasy, Rocketman is more Across the Universe

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