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![]() This great martial arts movie follows the beats and tropes of fictional king fu movies while burnishing the legend of Ip Man, a real life Grandmaster of Wing Chun kung fu and Bruce Lee’s teacher. The scene of an unarmed Master Ip facing down an armed Police Captain is a classic of the form. *I…
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Ip Man amid the Japanese occupation
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![]() Solomon Northup has just become an iconic American hero, some fifteen and a half decades after he lived. Americans from this day forth will know his name like they know Patrick Henry’s or Harriet Tubman’s. That’s not all. The mov…
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Steve McQueen directs Chiwetel Ejiofor
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![]() Well produced Tom Cruise historical epic, appealing to those of us who like such entertainments. As he so often does, Cruise plays a character at once naive and smug, who reveals an admirable steeliness by the third reel. |
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![]() This magnificent political biography also happens to be a very good movie. Not a great movie, but a great and important story, well told and even better acted by its two leads. Lessons in history and leadership should all be so charismatic. The movie has rhythms and totems unfamiliar to Amer…
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American superstars as African heroes
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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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![]() The Wolf of Long Island celebrates a craven criminal: a coke snorting, lude popping, reverse Robin Hood. What’s that? The biopic about the demented Jordan Belfort is titled The Wolf of Wall Street. Really? He spent scant time there. Belfort and his entire operation are Long Islanders dow…
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Does this look like fun? Yes! No.
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![]() The hero of many a Tom Clancy story gets rebooted in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, a more than competent action thriller. Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, Keira Knightley and Kenneth Branagh are much more than competent as its starring quartet, allowing the movie to draw from a deep well of moviestar…
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Branagh the Dir employs a killer villain
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![]() The Grand Budapest Hotel flaunts a garden of cinematic delights. Deliciously deadpan and deliriously fun for those of us who love the cinematic art form, Wes Anderson’s brilliant confection works high and low. Well, not too low, as even the physical comedy and silly surprises take a bit of sm…
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Evildoers: Dafoe & Brody
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![]() The Old West ended when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hightailed it to Bolivia. Old Westerns ended when Paul Newman and Robert Redford became Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, outlaw charmers the likes of which the Silver Screen had never seen before. Four Oscars plus three additional n…
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Bewitching Musical Interlude
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![]() Noah is a mashup of Old Testament and Global Warming theologies, one antediluvian, one anti-economic. Oh yeah, there’s also lots of Hollywood fantasy thrown in to make it a 21st century basso profondo action epic. The bizarre result is often ridiculous, but ultimately worthwhile both theologi…
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Leaden & bizarre, yet also worthwhile
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