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![]() Fans of the Beach Boys, Glen Campbell, the Mamas & the Papas, Sonny & Cher or Nancy Sinatra should seek out this documentary about the unsung musicians who made their music for them. The Wrecking Crew wasn’t an official name for the group. These independent studio players didn’t have an officia…
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Carol Kaye stars on Good Vibrations.
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![]() An immensely well done piece of agitprop, built around Sean Penn’s Best Actor performance and featuring Gus Van Sant’s most fully realized directing effort, this admirable biopic presents a world apart, yet right next door to the one in which most of us live and were raised. Straights needn’t …
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Sean Penn displays a lightness of being.
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![]() Great – if sadly flawed – exploration of the early California oil industry, dramatized through the exploits of an entrepreneurial ogre. A Chinatown for Oil, the movie serves as fascinating Golden State period piece and socialist screed, decrying the imagined crimes of tycoons as it celebrates … |
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![]() Well intentioned flop: the comedy never inspires laughs and the drama never hits home. Nonetheless, the great concept – oddball father drags practical daughter on a real treasure hunt through modern day suburbia – and the likable performances by Evan Rachel Wood and Michael Douglas make this wat… |
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![]() Devastatingly good story, achingly well performed, The Kite Runner – a must see movie and among the best of a very good year – illuminates one of the most important cultures of our time. Not light fare, though wonderfully joyous in stretches, The Kite Runner serves as the perfect set-up for "Char…
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Junior Sultans of Kabul
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![]() Superbad is still super funny, super filthy and super telling. That last is somewhat inadvertent, but the movie is more than just a lens into the fetid minds of unsupervised boys. The porn-powered self-absorption it observes among millennials dates it as Origin of the Snowflakes. "Just how I …
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Super Funny Script
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![]() Suburban drug running goes tragically awry in this fictionalized account of a real Southern California murder. Nearly as alarming as the 2000 murder is the callow nihilism of the SoCal teens and twentysomethings involved with it. Living in comfort, they admire the gangsta doggs celebrated on MT…
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Justin Timberlake: Dude can act.
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![]() Don’t let the crummy title scare you away from this surprisingly fun romantic comedy starring the ever charming Michelle Pfeiffer and featuring the fast-times wit of Amy Heckerling. Apparently this movie never made it into American theaters, though it did gross $24 million in Brazil. Those Braz… |
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![]() For grown fans of the original Superman TV show, Hollywoodland soothes a longstanding itch. Engagingly acted and well produced, this whodunnit joins the pantheon of high quality Hollywood murder mysteries. |
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![]() What we have here is a hard-boiled High School movie. Students in and around an underground drug ring allow Brick to revel in deceit and ironic detachment. Rian Johnson’s first movie then leavens itself through Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s romantic heroism. So what if JGL is mid-twenties posing …
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Richly Romantic: JGL & Nora Zehetner
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