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Boyhood is the first Great American Movie of 2014. It profiles the emergence of a slacker, delivered as the insightful backstory of an aimless guy who ends up haunting the streets of Austin. Through that Texan lens, the great Richard Linklater has created a transcendent portrait of 21st century…
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The Linklater Family Values Players
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War is Hell — an equation that the concluding episode of Planet of the Apes hammers home relentlessly. Both sides of the war for Earth, aka the Planet of the Apes, have understandable reasons to kill The Other. Their war is most assuredly hell, a legitimate, even perfectly justifiable hell…
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Smart Take
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Wannabe superheroes are an obvious target for movie comedy. Wonder then that so few moviemakers try it, even if two did in 2010. Super may not be the funniest of that pair, but it’s plenty comical and surprisingly deep at the same time. You can see why writer-director James Gunn got "Guardians …
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Ellen Page flaunts her booty, er, Boltie
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The pantheon of essential WWII movies has a new entrant. David Ayer’s Fury stars Brad Pitt as an American Staff Sergeant who must lead a platoon of Sherman tanks against the Germans’ superior Panzers. Think Chevies vs. Benzes, with Brad and his battle-hardened crew in an outgunned Sherman named…
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Bad Brad etches another Rushmorian pe...
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Halfway through this crowd-pleasing movie, a senior citizen in the row behind us blurted out “This is a very good movie.” He’s right, albeit his exclamation is more telling than intended, as it conveys The Judge’s appeal to middle-agers of Robert Downey Jr’s generation and especially to those o…
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The Moviestars Are The Thing.
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Birdman touches many cinematic erogenous zones, making it a guilty treat – a smart one – for cinephiles. Alejandro Iñárritu’s showbiz takedown is also the best theatrically-set movie since, well, maybe forever. OK, not forever, but probably since All About Eve…
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Such a Tease
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Nightcrawler is L.A.‘s Taxi Driver, with Jake Gyllenhaal’s morally vacuous street prowler supplanting Robert DeNiro’s demented urban loner. Dan Gilroy’s movie delivers a freakish amount of cinematic energy, exposing the nightmares of Los Angeles in particular, and our Eyewitness News society …
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Humanity? Hell no, keep filming.
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Channing Tatum’s tortured performance as Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Mark Schultz anchors Foxcatcher. Mark Ruffalo and Steve Carell orbit above him as Dave Schultz, his older brother and fellow Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler, and John du Pont, the crazy rich guy who murdered one of…
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Steve Carell masterfully plays this guy.
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Why did Exodus – the ultimate big-screen Passover story – premiere right before the start of Hanukkah? Obtuse timing aside, Ridley Scott has wrought a magnificent Biblical epic in Gods and Kings, the best of the year, if not the millennium, and as thoughtful an action movie as you’ll ever exp…
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Moses our Teacher as Action Hero
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A father of computer science and nerdy war hero makes a fine subject for a rather dreamy biopic. Oh yeah, Alan Turing was also a persecuted gay man, back when homosexuality was criminalized in Great Britain. The Imitation Game thus has several storylines running through it, perhaps explaining w…
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The real Alan Turing, with a rare smile
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