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There's No Busi...
Really Great 66 Points 1954

There’s No Business Like Show Business and there was no show business phonier than vaudeville, till movies. So an overtly phony movie about vaudeville makes for a phony convergence. It was perhaps the last of the musical extravaganzas, a calorically rich compendium of Irving Berlin’s showstoppi…

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WikChip Video Marilyn Monroe & Donald O'Connor: Sta...
The Wind That S...
OK 88 Points 2006

A story of brothers ripped apart by revolution should be better than the formulaic The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Cloaked in the emerald charm of Ireland, yet curiously unengaging, it’s more socialist screed about the Irish republican revolution than ripping good yarn.

The Irish revolutio…

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WikChip Image Brothers, close as can be, ripped apart
The Wind Rises
OK 66 Points 2013

Hard not to think of The Wind Rises as The Zero Movie, as it’s about the engineer who designed Imperial Japan’s lethal fighter – the dreaded Japanese Zero. Instead, Jirô Horikoshi gets painted in hagiographic terms in a movie nominated this year for an Oscar and a Golden Globe: Best Animate…

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WikChip Video Flights of Fancy in a Fatally Flawed ...
The Treasure of...
Perfect 66 Points 1948

Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, OTOH, does need to be viewed by every serious movie fan. By turns funny, challenging and intriguing, it deserves its status as one of the greatest movies of all time. Humphrey Bogart’s scurrilous Fred C. Dobbs …

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WikChip Image "What gold does to men's souls"
The Secret of N...
Great 66 Points 1980

Tesla stands alone: the most mystical, the most gifted, the most freaky of the great industrial magnates, e.g., Edison, Westinghouse & J.P. Morgan, who also appear in this biopic of the Serbian-American inventor. From Zagreb, it presents as a bizarre movie where people’s mouths don’t match what’…

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WikChip Video Tesla meets J.P. Morgan. Edison fumes.
The Newton Boys
Very Good 83 Points 1998

Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, the Newton Boys were successful bank robbers, so it’s an injustice that they’re not as famous – nor their biopic as celebrated – as that of those other early 20th century Texas outlaws. Especially because The Newton Boys is a slick, rollicking and interesting movie, on…

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The Immigrant
Great 83 Points 2014

Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner form a tortured romantic triangle at the heart of The Immigrant, a touching period drama. Cotillard, the immigrant of the title, enters America with her sister through Ellis Island. Traumatized back in Poland, she gets beset with new problems…

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WikChip Image Why so sad? She has her reasons.
The Great Gatsby
None Yet 0 Points 2013
The Blue Angel
Really Great 66 Points 1930

Seminal movie, thy name is The Blue Angel, Der Blaue Engel in its native German. Josef von Sternberg was 36 when he paired unknown Marlene Dietrich with eminent Emil Jannings. Dietrich and von Sternberg rocketed straight to Hollywood. Jannings was left behind, kind of like in the story its…

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WikChip Video Falling In Love Again with Marlene
Thérèse
Great 66 Points 2012

Thérèse is a great film by the great Claude Miller of the great French novel Thérèse Desqueyroux, 1927. Think of it as Madame Bovary in the pine forests of Southwest France. Only Thérèse barely has sex, let alone affairs. Talk about a banal life. Look at her stunning poster visag…

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WikChip Image Taking in their combined estate.