| Caché (Hidden) [DVD] |
Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) is a different kind of thriller because it is not about its answers, but rather about its questions. The film’s meat is in the journey, not the ...
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| Can't Hardly Wait [Blu-Ray] |
In terms of plot, character, and tone, Can’t Hardly Wait sits somewhere between the early-’80s John Hughes oeuvre and the more raunchy comedies like Porky’s (1981). While ...
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| Cape Fear (1962) [DVD] |
Cape Fear is a single-minded thriller about a civilized man's forced descent into violence in order to protect his family from a sadistic monster. It is fueled by the same ideology that ...
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| Cape Fear (1991) [DVD] |
The character of Sam Bowden as played by Nick Nolte in Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear is a far different man than the one played by Gregory Peck in J. Lee Thompson's 1962 original. As ...
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| Capitalism: A Love Story |
Like his two most recent documentary-polemics, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Sicko (2007), Capitalism: A Love Story is particularly well timed--ripped right from the headlines, you ...
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| Capote |
Capote, a brilliantly tense and disquieting film, covers only six years in the life of writer Truman Capote -- less than half a decade -- yet it brilliantly employs those years to convey ...
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| Capturing the Friedmans |
Andrew Jarecki’s Sundance award-winning documentary Capturing the Friedmans is two things at once: a probing look at the social panic surrounding child abuse and a disturbingly close ...
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| Carnival of Souls [DVD] |
Television and the cinema have long had a strange, antagonistic relationship. When first introduced in the late 1940s, television posed a major threat to the monopoly the movies held on mass ...
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| Carrie [DVD] |
Because teen horror movies have become such a commodified staple of the pop culture landscape, it is easy to overlook just what an accomplishment Brian De Palma's Carrie, the teen gothic ...
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| Cars |
While Cars falls somewhat short of the benchmark set by Pixar’s other films, which include both Toy Story movies (1995 and 1999), A Bug’s Life (1998), and The ...
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| Casino |
He has also proven himself to be versatile, with a wide range of films that include intense social commentary ("Taxi Driver"), controversial religious explorations ("The Last Temptation of Christ"), ...
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| Casino Royale [DVD] |
How I sometimes love to be ...
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| Casque d'or [DVD] |
Signoret stars as Marie, a beautiful prostitute in turn-of-the-century Paris who is at any given moment on the arm of one of suave gang leader Felix Leca’s (Claude Dauphin) men. At the beginning ...
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| Cast Away [DVD] |
It is no small irony in Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away that Chuck Norland, a FedEx
efficiency expert whose professional life revolves around the clock, winds up stranded on a
deserted island ...
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| Cat People [DVD] |
When Paul Schrader remade Cat People exactly 40 years later in 1982, it was again notable for being a genuinely serious horror movie in the midst of increasingly parodic horror movies, ...
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| Catch Me If You Can |
Based on a true story, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can is about Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., who, at the age of 16, dropped out of high school and ran away from home. Unlike most teenage ...
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| Catch-22 |
The decade of the 1970s, which is generally considered to be one of the most vibrant andcreative periods of American filmmaking, was bookended by two enormous, challenging,high-budget experimental ...
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| Cats & Dogs |
Until a few years ago, Cats & Dogs would have been unthinkable as a live-action movie. But, with the rapid advances in computer-generated imagery and animatronic puppetry, the technical ...
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| Cecil B. DeMented |
I am always somewhat leery of films in which the characters too obviously function as the
mouthpiece of the filmmaker. I am, of course, not naive enough to believe that movie
characters are (or ...
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| Celebrity |
That the most wretched character is a celebrity journalist is no surprise. Considering the beating Allen has taken in the media over the years, especially in the tabloids, who could imagine him ...
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| Cemetery Man (aka Dellamorte Dellamore) [DVD] |
Another thing it resists is easy plot summary, but I’ll try anyway. Rupert Everett, several years before attaining American popularity via his charming supporting role as Julia Roberts’s ...
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| Center Stage |
"Center Stage" is a fairly low-key melodrama set against the high stakes world of professional ballet in the heart of New York. And, as it is fairly low-key and almost unoriginal, it would be ...
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| Change of Habit [DVD] |
The late 1960s was an incredibly turbulent era for Hollywood. Trapped in what appeared to be a never-ending downward spiral, many of the studios were in dire economic straits and were being bought ...
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| Changeling |
The undeniably fascinating nature of Collins’s true-life story gives Changeling a solid backbone that makes the film imminently watchable, even when it should be dragging. Eastwood’s ...
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| Changing Lanes |
The title of Changing Lanes comes from a crucial incident that takes place on the FDR expressway in New York: Two men, both of whom are desperate to get to the courthouse for different ...
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| Charade [DVD] |
In fact, Grant’s performance in Charade, which was one of the last three of his career, can be seen as a fitting capstone to the creation of the peerless Cary Grant persona that was refined ...
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| Charlie and the Chocolate Factory |
For the fourth time, Burton teams with actor Johnny Depp, and it's no small surprise that Burton's best work occurs when Depp is in the lead (see also 1990's Edward Scissorhands and 1994's ...
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| Charlie Wilson's War |
When we first meet Charlie Wilson, he is being given an award for his important role in helping to end the Cold War, a moment of teary-eyed respectfulness that is immediately contrasted with a ...
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| Charlotte's Web |
The producers of the new, live-action version of Charlotte’s Web don’t have that luxury because they made the decision to use real animals with CGI-enhancement. Hence, any depiction of ...
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| Chasing Amy [Blu-Ray] |
Specifically, the film explores a particular strand of cultural hypocrisy that has been constantly hammered into the male psyche and reinforced in almost every aspect of Western society. To quote ...
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| Chasing Amy [DVD] |
For many, "Chasing Amy" is a film that hits a nerve. With blunt humor and a stark, honest approach, it tackles modern romance in the way few films do. It doesn't soften the edges or candy-color ...
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| Che [DVD] |
Although each of the film’s two parts is distinctly different both narratively and aesthetically, Soderbergh intended for them to be seen together (the dictates of the marketplace ultimately ...
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| Chicago |
Originally staged in 1975 and successfully revived in 1996, Chicago is probably the most cynical musical to ever hit Broadway. Its wicked combination of sex, media satire, and moral pessimism ...
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| Chicago 10 [DVD] |
Morgen, whose last film was the intriguing and gossipy Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture (2003), knows how to build momentum and sustain it. No one will mistake ...
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| Chicken Little |
Zach Braff (Scrubs) voices the titular chicken of diminished proportions, who lives in a cute little town where all the characters are animals, giving the movie the look of a Richard Scarry ...
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| Chicken Run |
There is just something about chickens that makes them inherently humorous. Perhaps it is the way they walk, or the absurd manner in which they hold themselves. Perhaps their shape--that large, ...
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| Child's Play [DVD] |
Originally intended to be a send-up of the ridiculous nature of the children’s toy industry, Child’s Play begins with a serial killer named Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) using voodoo to ...
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| Children of Men |
Based on the novel by P.D. James, Children of Men is a rare futuristic thriller that strikes deep at the heart of current problems. Considering recent worldwide population numbers, there is ...
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| Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du paradis) [DVD] |
Often referred to as the French answer to Gone With the Wind (1939) and certainly among the most beloved (if not the most beloved) of French films, Marcel Carné's gorgeous and ...
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| Chocolat |
Lasse Hallström's Chocolat is a breezy, well-made, but tiresomely preachy fableabout a mysterious woman who, through the delectable morsels in her chocolate shop, frees asmall French ...
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| Chungking Express (Chongquing Senlin) |
Wrong. ...
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| Cinderella Man |
Much of the film’s grit and emotional strength can be attributed to the towering central performance by Russell Crowe as James J. Braddock, the real-life pugilist hero from New Jersey who came ...
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| Circus of Horrors [DVD] |
Circus of Horrors is a bizarre British horror flick, which followed closely along the path then-recently blazed by the sexual innuendo and violence of Hammer Studios films like The Curse ...
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| City by the Sea |
City by the Sea, which is about a veteran New York police detective who must track down his own murder-suspect son, was based on a true story reported in the pages of Esquire by ...
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| City of Angels |
It is an important scene for several reasons. First of all, it is one of many instances in the film that make angels seem thoroughly plausible. The film presents these fantastic beings as ...
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| City of God (Cidade de Deus) |
Not since Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) or P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) has there been a film of such relentless cinematic energy and sprawling narrative intensity as ...
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| CJ7 [Blu-Ray] |
The story concerns a widowed father named Ti (Stephen Chow) and his elementary-age son, Dicky (Jiao Xu, who is actually a girl). Ti and Dicky are dirt-poor. How poor? They live in a single room in a ...
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| Claire's Knee (Le Genou de Claire) [DVD] |
The man who is to be married in a month is Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), but he is anything but level-headed. We never see the woman he is about to marry except a single picture that is described by ...
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| Clash of the Titans |
Drawing from the original screenplay by Beverly Cross, who drew freely from numerous Greek myths and filled them out with some creative license and good-natured silliness (an approach she also used ...
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| Classe tous risques [DVD] |
To some extent, it is understandable that Sautet’s film fell into the shadows. Although stylishly shot in black and white with a mixture of handheld neorealism and dramatic close-ups, it does not ...
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| Cléo From 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7) [DVD] |
The real beauty of Varda’s film, only her second feature, is that it works simultaneously on so many levels. It is, first and foremost, a nuanced character study, as we watch Cléo (Corinne ...
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| Clean, Shaven [DVD] |
Peter Greene, who most will recognize as the nefarious Zed from Pulp Fiction (1994), gives an amazingly detailed and sympathetic performance as Peter Winter, a schizophrenic young man who has ...
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| Cleopatra [DVD] |
In terms of sheer size and scope, legend and excess, few Hollywood films will ever be able
to hold a candle to Joseph L. Mankiewicz's epic production of Cleopatra. From
the beginning, when ...
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| Clerks II |
Thus, it’s not surprising that, two years later, not only have Jay and Silent Bob been returned to the silver screen, but they have been resurrected in Clerks II, a sequel to the 1994 ...
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| Clerks [Blu-Ray] |
Along with Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1991), which was released three years earlier, Smith’s scrappy black-and-white ode to the fears and loathings of post-collegiate misfits in a New ...
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| Closer |
Now, disillusion does not in and of itself a bad film make. In fact, many great films have explored the depths of spiritual malaise and dehumanization to great effect—one might think of D.W. ...
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| Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs [Blu-Ray] |
The movie’s explanation for this strange phenomenon is one Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), an aspiring inventor whose contraptions routinely end in disaster. Constantly locked away in a towering, ...
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| Cloverfield [DVD] |
The film's conceit--some might say gimmick--is that we're supposedly watching found video footage that has since become the possession of the U.S. government. An opening disclaimer informs us it ...
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| Clueless [DVD] |
Heckerling made her name in the early 1980s as a rare female director working in Hollywood. Her breakout hit was Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), an uneven, but frequently hilarious and ...
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| Coach Carter |
A relatively new dramatic subgenre that emerged in the late 1980s as a feel-good antidote to media stories and films about existential despair in the 'hood, inspirational coach/teacher films are ...
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| Cold Creek Manor |
The first thing you think when the naïve city family moves into the big, rambling, dilapidated manor in the backwoods of upstate New York and see a bright, shining pane of red stained glass ...
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| Cold Mountain |
At a cost of some $80 million, Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s popular novel Cold Mountain is Miramax’s biggest Oscar-baiting gamble to date. A broad, sprawling, ...
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| Collateral |
This sense of the real and surreal colliding was particularly heightened in The Insider and Ali because they were based on true stories. In Collateral, however, Mann throws his ...
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| Collateral Damage |
Originally pulled from the fall 2001 release schedule in the wake of the events of September 11, when Hollywood had an unsurprisingly temporary and fleeting crisis of conscience regarding the ...
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| Collectors |
Julian P. Hobbs' documentary Collectors is a disturbing, but utterly intriguingpiece of work that deals with twin American fascinations: serial killing and art collecting.The two main subjects ...
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| Color of Night |
Bruce Willis stars as Dr. Bill Capa, an expensive New York psychoanalyst who speaks a little too rough to one of his patients (who we saw during the opening credits putting lipstick on her teeth, so ...
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| Comic Book Confidential [DVD] |
The popular consensus is that comic books have been largely neglected within the realms of "high culture" and "high art" because they are perceived as being aimed at children. The simple phrase ...
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| Commando [DVD] |
In many ways, Commando helped to forge and solidify the Schwarzenegger action-movie persona, which for many is reason enough to despise the film. At the time, the former Mr. Universe was ...
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| Communion [DVD] |
"'Communion' was written to bring into question the idea of alien abduction. It was intended to enrich speculation about this experience by placing it in historical perspective and--at the same ...
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| Con Air |
Bruckheimer, working solo for the first time since the death of his partner, Don Simpson, has topped himself with "Con Air" by making it the first brainless action movie with an independent film ...
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| Confessions of a Dangerous Mind |
In his “unauthorized” autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, TV producer Chuck Barris, the creator of such memorably cheesy game shows as The Dating Game, The Newlywed ...
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| Confidence |
“So, I’m dead,” is the opening line of voice-over narration in the neo-noir crime twister Confidence. It is spoken by a slick con artist named Jake Vig (Edward Burns) who is lying in a ...
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| Conquest of the Planet of the Apes [DVD] |
(Warning: As it is difficult to discuss adequately the Planet of the Apes series without giving away some important plot information and potential surprises (especially in the first film), ...
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| Constantine |
Keanu Reeves, mixing the skinny-black-tie look of Reservoir Dogs with his Matrix trench-coat, stars as the haunted, world-weary John Constantine, one of only a few human beings who are ...
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| Contact |
These are all questions that "Contact" addresses in one way or another, and the most intelligent aspect of the movie is that it realizes it doesn't know everything, so it doesn't try to force ...
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| Contempt (Le Mépris) [DVD] |
While Contempt is seen by many as Godard’s most “commercial” or “mainstream” film, it is also one of his most emotionally stirring and deeply felt. At the center of the film is the ...
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| Cookie's Fortune |
Of course, Holly Springs is also the kind of small, Southern town that produces people like Camille Orcutt (Glenn Close), a self-righteous, hypocritical, spinster busybody whose overzealous desire to ...
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| Cool World [DVD] |
Ralph Bakshi’s live-action-and-animation-mixed spectacle Cool World was in the unfortunate position of following just a few years after Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit? ...
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| Cop Land |
The hero of "Cop Land" is Freddy Heflin, played by Sylvester Stallone. By now, everyone knows that Stallone took a huge cut in pay and followed the "Raging Bull" School of Acting by putting on 40 ...
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| Cop Out |
The basic set-up in Cop Out is a riff on all those mixed-race buddy-cop movies from the 1980s (48 Hrs., Lethal Weapon, etc.). Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan star as Jimmy Monroe ...
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| Copycat |
The story revolves around a serial killer whose trademark style is copycatting famous murderers before him such as Ted Bundy and the Boston Strangler. Although the plot starts out tight, it unravels ...
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| Coraline |
Coraline eventually learns why the grandmother doesn’t want children in the house, and it’s not because she hates kids. Rather, it is what is on the other side of the door in the living room: a ...
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| Corridors of Blood [DVD] |
Lee had already reimagined Karloff’s signature role as Frankenstein’s monster in 1957’s The Curse of Frankenstein, as well Bela Lugosi’s iconic portrayal of the most well-known of ...
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| Coup de torchon [DVD] |
Director Bertrand Tavernier has described his Coup de torchon (Clean
Slate) as a film about redemption through crime. Based on the 1964 pulp paperback
Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson, ...
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| Courage Under Fire [DVD] |
The surface story of Courage Under Fire is about an Army colonel
investigating the merits of the first woman ever considered for the Medal of
Honor for combat. But the underlying and more ...
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| Coyote Ugly |
"Coyote Ugly" is not much more than a silly, groan-inducing tale of a goodgirl trying to make it in big bad New York City livened up with a fewrousing scenes of curvaceous young women in tight ...
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| Cradle Will Rock |
At the end of "Cradle Will Rock," a group of actors, vaudeville performers, and dedicated theater goers perform a symbolic
funeral procession mourning the death of the Federal Theater Project, an ...
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| Crash (1996) |
Here is a film that is genuinely disturbing, but not for the reasons you would immediately think of. While the sexual lives of the characters are deviant and often times repulsive, it's the film's ...
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| Crash (2005) |
Although at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum, the chill in the air, visually evoked by the film's cool blue palette and occasional sprinkling of snow, has a similar effect as the heat ...
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| Crazed Fruit (Kurutta Kajitsu) [DVD] |
As it so happens, at about that same time a similar cinematic cycle was beginning on the other side of the world in Japan, which was just a few years out of Allied occupation and was trying to ...
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| Crazy Heart [Blu-Ray] |
That is precisely what he does in Crazy Heart as Bad Blake, a scraggly 57-year-old country-and-western singer/songwriter who makes ends barely meet by tooling around the desert Southwest in ...
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| Crazy in Alabama |
"Crazy in Alabama" is composed of two distinctly different narratives that run parallel to each other throughout the film, until at the end they are tenuously linked by the theme of "freedom." Either ...
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| Cría cuervos [DVD] |
The film's central character is Ana (Ana Torrent, the dark-eyed tyke from Spirit of the Beehive), one of three orphaned siblings who are being cared for by their Aunt Paulina (Mónica ...
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| Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) [DVD] |
>
"Beautiful" and "haunting" are probably the two most oft-used words ...
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| Crimes and Misdemeanors |
One of the stories concerns a successful, wealthy ophthalmologist named Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau). For the past two years, he has been carrying on an extramarital affair with a younger, ...
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| Criminal |
Gregory Jacob’s Criminal, which is a mostly faithful remake of a well-received 2001 Argentinean film called Nine Queens, attempts to do something similar, but falls short. Consummate ...
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| Cronos |
So why is immortality such an immortal topic? Maybe it is because modernmedicine is always finding new and inventive ways to prolong life. Maybe it isbecause we fear death and what lies beyond, and ...
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| Crossroads [DVD] |
Crossroads, Britney Spears' feature-film debut in which she plays a recent high-school graduate searching for her true self, is simply too bizarre in too many ways to be pawned off as a bad ...
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| Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu zang long) [Blu-Ray] |
Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Wo hu zang long) is a perfect example of what American action movies are often lacking: It doesn't try to blow you out of your seat in a ...
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| Cruel Intentions |
Interestingly enough, the movie works in spite of all this, or, perhaps, because of it. After all, if these characters did act in a manner befitting the age range they are supposed to inhabit, the ...
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| Cruising |
Today's mainstream cultural views are drastically different from those in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was first entering the White House, the majority of suburban Americans had never heard of Robert ...
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| Crumb [DVD] |
Zwigoff wisely uses a format that is unadorned by voice-over narration or explicit explanations, which allows the subjects to speak for themselves (he took the same approach in his first ...
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| Curdled |
"Curdled" thinks that at least the murders in Miami are taken care of by a group of shapely Latin American women (including MTV's Daisy Fuentes) working for a company called PFCS (Post Forensic ...
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| Cure (Kyua) [DVD] |
That is the basic premise of Cure, a stylish horror thriller that looks on the surface like police procedural, but is really an eerie meditation on the self--who we are and how much power we ...
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| Cursed |
Ostensibly a reworking of the werewolf movie, Cursed bears all the hallmarks of a film that has been worked and reworked and reworked again. The opening sequence, which is set to Bowling for ...
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