MovieSorter

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The Big Short
Great 66 Points 2015

The Big Short isn’t the Big Lie, but isn’t far from it either. The government hides just offscreen in Adam McKay’s seriocomic docudrama about the epic falsehoods that consumed the banking industry in 2008.

Falsehoods one and two were Washington’s ability to safely stimulate homeownership amo…

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WikChip Video Margot Robbie in a bubblebath
The 33
Great 83 Points 2015

Real-life drama ripped from TV news gets no more riveting or charming than in The 33, about the Chilean miners trapped half a mile below ground five years ago. Some three billion people followed their drama in 2010, including me and probably you. The fact that all 33 were safely brought to the …

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WikChip Video The real story of The 33
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.
Patriots Day
Really Great 83 Points 2016

Patriots Day gets up close and personal with the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath. By turns moving, enraging, loving and occasionally funny, it’s an unflinching look at lone wolf terrorism and how one American city fought back against Islamism in their midst. Two previously unseen aspe…

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WikChip Video The Battle of Watertown
Parkland
Good 17 Points 2013

Can you really make an entire feature length film out of a single day’s events following JFK’s assasination? Well, yes – by following four different stories: Zapruder the famous film-maker, The Oswalds, the law, and the emergency room doctors and nurses. The result is a bit muddled, but keeps …

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Oppenheimer
Really Great 66 Points 2023

J. Robert Oppenheimer is an American hero, flawed like most, resolute when it mattered. The Father of the Atomic Bomb saved countless US Marines, sailors and airmen when his work forced Imperial Japan to surrender short of an amphibious attack on Tokyo. (That would have made Iwo Jima look like …

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WikChip Image The real Einstein & Oppenheimer
Operation Finale
Perfect 66 Points 2018

The banality of evil gets a powerful debunking in Operation Finale, an awkwardly if accurately titled docudrama about the Mossad’s 1960 capture of Final Solution logistics chief Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Little Adolf was famously said to embody “the banality of evil” as he dissembled during …

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WikChip Video The (real) Man Who Got Eichmann
Only the Brave
Really Great 83 Points 2017

See this movie. It’s our duty as citizens, but also deeply cathartic. Tears ran down my face, twice, yet my heart was warmed. Real men behaving chivalrously does that to me, inspires a man-cry. Strong women too!

Unwieldy title aside, Only the Brave artfully recounts the story of the 19 Arizo…

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WikChip Video See this movie: Best Trailer++
Napoleon
Very Good 66 Points 2023

In Theaters Now

A movie that fits the man who made France into a triumphant titan of the early 1800s, Napoleon meets many of the moments in an epochal life from two centuries ago. Ridley Scott knows historic drama about larger-than-life figures like few other directors, and cast well with Joaquin Phoenix as hi…

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WikChip Image Emperor Napoleon crowns Empress Josep...
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