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12 Strong
Great 83 Points 2018

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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WikChip Video Cool details about the real Horse Sol...
The 15:17 to Paris
Very Good 83 Points 2018

Clint Eastwood’s terrorist-on-a-train film unspools like a cinéma vérité home movie. Three yokels from Sacramento – California’s middle-American capital city – get the chance to be heroes and don’t blow it.

Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos & Anthony Sadler famously play themselves as the three du…

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WikChip Video Ellen interviews 3 American heroes.
7 Days in Entebbe
OK 83 Points 2018

The Raid on Entebbe stands as one of the great military feats of all time. Then there’s 7 Days in Entebbe, which stumbles along as a just OK recreation of that legendary event. Leftist in orientation, this Jeff Skoll production1 tells a full story about the communist kidnappers and their radi…

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WikChip Video The movie's not nearly this good.
Chappaquiddick
Really Great 83 Points 2018

Being a Kennedy came with compulsions, including sailing, drinking, womanizing and the presidency, those last with fatal effect. Ted Kennedy’s date with death didn’t lead to another dead Kennedy, but to the manslaughter of a loyal supporter: Mary Jo Kopechne, a name familiar to baby-boomers acros…

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WikChip Video She didn't drown. She suffocated, slo...
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
BlacKkKlansman
Very Good 83 Points 2018

Spike Lee found a true American tale worthy of his talents in the exploits of detective Ron Stallworth, the black officer who led a successful takedown of the KKK in late Seventies America. It’s crazy funny.

Stallworth is a true American hero, straight up, the only one unblemished in Lee’s ted…

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WikChip Image Real Ron Stallworth, American Hero
Bohemian Rhapsody
Very Good 83 Points 2018

Queen were never one of my bands. No Queen on vinyl, nor even any in my pocket. Sure, I was awed by the rangy brilliance of Bohemian Rhapsody, plus well entertained by the propulsive insouciance of Killer Queen and pop perfection of Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But the fascist commercial…

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WikChip Video Legendary Set
Can You Ever Fo...
OK 83 Points 2018

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is not unforgivably bad, but is hardly a good movie either. The small stakes crimes of a literary criminal and her wages of sin trigger our morbid fascination with human train wrecks.

Is that so bad? No, but it ain’t enough to be fulfilling. Ultimately just OK, Melis…

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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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