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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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![]() Flash of Genius is an involving and interesting, albeit frustrating, biopic of a guy who succeeds at invention, fails at business and craters at life. It’s well recommended for those interested in cars and/or entrepreneurs, and for fans of Greg Kinnear. Being a successful inventor wasn’t en…
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Kearns through a windshield doggedly
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![]() Funny and sad in equal measures, this brilliant movie brings to life the media event that put a postscript on one of the saddest chapters in American history.
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"I'd a done it" sounds like OJ
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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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![]() We Americans are blessedly unfamiliar with the “most violent prisoner in Britain,” a nut called Charles Bronson. I’d of happily gone on that way had Tom Hardy not become an actor whose riveting performances demand that his every great role be viewed. And his feral performance as Charles Bronson…
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One more bystander hurt by Bronson
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![]() Deeply unsatisfying, notwithstanding the top-drawer talent that created it, this adaptation of a celebrated novel proves that some books should never make the heavenly transition to the silver screen. Shame on Peter Jackson – the Lord of the Ring…
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Sarandon was great, a rarity in this ...
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![]() Dyspeptic and deeply sacrilegious, the Coen Brothers’ latest is also reliably funny and brilliantly surreal. A ludicrous fable of Biblical proportions, the movie nonetheless oozes verisimilitude, a credit to the manifold talents of the auteur brothers behind it and their virtual Yiddish theater …
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Temptation: One of many Biblical tests.
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![]() More than your ordinary police procedural, this affecting Argentine import includes a decidedly grown-up office romance & insight into Perón’s Argentina. Veteran Law & Order director Juan José Campanella deserves his Best Foreign Language Oscar for an &1 if nothing else.1 His film’s two…
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Argentine Law & Order Writ Large
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![]() France et le Québec endured Jacques Mesrine’s spectacular 1960s and 70s criminal career, anointing him a media sensation in the process. The first half of this too-big-for-a-single-movie story gets told in Mesrine: Killer Instinct, the concluding chapters in Mesrine: Public Enemy #1:…
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Anti-hero: "Nobody kills me until I s...
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![]() Malkovich, Lane and the Greatest Horse Ever, what could go wrong? Nothing, it turns out, although Secretariat never pulls a Secretariat, turning promise into triumph. Perhaps because it’s a Disney production – reverential to a fault – or perhaps because of its mildly precious dialogue. Sti…
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Big Red and his Intrepid Owner
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