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![]() Want to hear what perfect dialog sounds like? Listen to Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. Credit Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and director Billy Wilder, three legendary writers who didn’t get along but nonetheless birthed “the paradigmatic film noir.”1 A perfect…
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MacMurray & Stanwyck speak perfect di...
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![]() Infernal Affairs screams Hong Kong 2002. Movie theaters advertise Will Smith & Tommy Lee Jones back in black and Harrison Ford as Capt. Alexei Vostrikov. Within that milieu, Alan Mak & Wai-keung Lau’s blockbuster unspools a cop story of such depth, perfection and tension that Martin Scorsese …
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Rock This
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![]() Dial M for Murder is lesser Hitchcock, yet worth watching for its classic tropes, timeless title and for Grace Kelly. But, the convoluted and constrained plot is insufficiently removed from its stage play roots.
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Hitch loved blond: Grace Kelly's Gold...
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![]() Marilyn Monroe didn’t want to appear in River of No Return, nor did Otto Preminger want to direct it, especially if Marilyn was to star. Studio contracts forced them into it and we’re all the better for it today. River of No Return is a fine mid-Fifties Western, with surprising Italian root…
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Marilyn sings: Let it wash over you.
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![]() What we have here is movie magic sans modern FX. Instead Charade conjures its allure from a couple of nonpareil moviestars delivering sparkling dialog in an idealized Paris while a seductive theme song plays in the background. Such an intoxicating mix makes it easy to fall in love with Cary Gr…
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Moviestar Magic Incarnate
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![]() The Last of the Mohicans was a benchmark in ’92. It still packs an action wallop, delivers a romantic jolt and provides a lens into the development of the American character, notwithstanding its historical liberties. This cinematically big movie features a perfect man who engages in a perfe…
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Last Mohican: Russell Means' Chingach...
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![]() The Conversation was one of Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated early Seventies movies, nominated for Best Picture and winner of the Palme d’Or. Deeply accomplished, occasionally fascinating, a time capsule of San Francisco from 1973, it nonetheless disappoints all these decades later. The min…
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Coppola talks 'The Conversation' in 1974
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![]() Big time action-comedies kind of got started with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy in 48 Hrs. Big stars, big action, big laughs – big time. Walter Hill was an action guy, a Western action guy. Directing megahunk Nolte, with a never funnier Murphy, set in San Francisco, his big hit paved the way f…
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"New Sheriff in Town" Reggie Hammond
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Out of Sight and into the pantheon of crime-comedies – start with Stephen Soderburgh directing George Clooney in an Elmore Leonard story. Speaking of gorgeous, J-Lo gets into the trunk with G-Cloo.
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Other positives: Bright bluesy opening; Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films producing; Clooney, youn…
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Trunk Spooning: Meet Cute Classic
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![]() In the Cut deserves more than mere notoriety for a provocative title and Meg Ryan’s erotic performance, though the latter is monumental – No more RomComs for the RomCom Queen. – and vividly memorable. Slow starting, moody, Jane Campion’s movie finally turns fully creepy 30 min in, not a mome…
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The movie's better than the trailer.
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