| F for Fake [DVD] |
On the other hand, F for Fake is a wonderfully fitting conclusion to Welles’ career, a playful exploration of the mysteries of art, magic, and fraud, all themes that were central to his ...
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| Face/Off [DVD] |
Woo's coup de grace was having John Travolta (who had already worked with Woo in Broken Arrow) and Nicolas Cage, two of Hollywood's most unique, interesting, and gifted actors, in the same ...
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| Fahrenheit 9/11 |
When documentary filmmaker and outspoken activist Michael Moore accepted his Oscar for Bowling for Columbine at the 2003 Academy Awards, he was booed off the stage when he unexpectedly ...
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| Fallen Angels Paradise (Gannet Al-Shayatin) |
Ossama Fawzi's Fallen Angels Paradise (Gannet Al-Shayatin) is an
oddly grotesque black comedy that uses the corpse of a recently deceased homeless man to
force together two disparate ...
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| Fanfan la Tulipe [DVD] |
As embodied by the handsome and charming Gérard Philipe, who by the early 1950s was already a major movie star, Fanfan is the quintessential French hero, an unbridled free spirit who is as quick ...
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| Fanny and Alexander [DVD] |
Yet, it is hard not to see Fanny and Alexander as a grand final statement on Bergman’s part, the fitting capstone of an extraordinary, virtually unrivaled filmmaking career. Bergman himself ...
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| Fantastic Four |
Of course, despite a dedicated core of fans and a history spanning almost 45 years, most will agree that the Fantastic Four are a second-tier cadre of superheroes. Created in 1961 by Marvel ...
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| Fantastic Mr. Fox [Blu-Ray] |
His last two films, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (2004) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007), were hampered by a thematic tiredness and a stagy, hyperrealized production design that ...
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| Far From Heaven |
In the visually stunning and emotionally stirring Far From Heaven, writer/director Todd Haynes channels the resplendent ’50s cinema of Douglas Sirk into a melodramatic masterpiece. Haynes, ...
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| Fargo |
Brought to life with wonderful affection by Frances McDormand, Marge is such a fundamentally decent person that you have to wonder how she manages to get mixed up in all "malfeasance" (as she puts ...
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| Fast Times at Ridgemont High |
The book was optioned for a film before it even hit the bookshelves, and a year later, first-time director Amy Heckerling had the movie in theaters. Unfortunately, while the book is poignant, ...
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| Fat Girl (À ma soeur!) [DVD] |
With Fat Girl (À ma soeur!), controversial French provocateur Catherine Breillat returned to the subject with which she began her cinematic odyssey nearly 30 years earlier: adolescent ...
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| Fatal Attraction [DVD] |
Fatal Attraction was one of those rare films that became a true cultural phenomenon. Conceived of as a thriller about ordinary life turned upside down when a happily married man has a weekend ...
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| Fear |
All of this is what lurks underneath the new thriller "Fear." Once you hose off the oozy, Seattle music video shell it sells itself under, you might be surprised to find some basic human truths. If ...
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| Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [DVD] |
The answers to those two questions are a resounding “yes” to the former and a “no” to the latter, which applies to the movie as a whole. There is plenty of drug-induced wandering in this ...
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| Feast |
The finished product of the third and final season of Project Greenlight, the reality show created by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Chris Moore that picked unknown filmmakers and gave them ...
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| Fellini Satyricon |
The film is based on the partial remnants of an unfinished manuscript by the ancient writer Petronius. Fellini uses the fragmentary source material to his advantage, allowing him to make a film that ...
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| Female Trouble [DVD] |
What makes the early trash cinema of John Waters so unique is the breadth of his influences and how those influences found their way into his manic, often repulsive low-budget midnight flicks. ...
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| Femme Fatale |
Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale is a tour de force of giddy-enthralling cinematic trashiness. It’s a true return to a form for an old master who is constantly threatening to mellow and go ...
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| Fever Pitch |
Fever Pitch plays with that line in its romantic triangle about a boy, a girl, and the Boston Red Sox. Ben (Jimmy Fallon), a ninth-grade math teacher, is a diehard Red Sox fan. He has gone ...
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| Fiend Without a Face [DVD] |
Fiend Without a Face is considered by many to be the best movie of the brief,
five-year outpouring of science-fiction/horror hybrids in Great Britain in the late 1950s.
Although shot on a ...
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| Fierce Creatures |
Together for the first time since 1988 are the four leads: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline, and Michael Palin. For those of you with good memories, you will also notice that the film ...
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| Fight Club [DVD] |
If were not based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, I would have assumed that
David Fincher's "Fight Club" was a nightmarish extension of feminist author
Susan Faldui's recent book, "Stiffed." In ...
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| Fighting |
Channing Tatum (Step It Up, Stop-Loss) brings his brooding intensity and frat-boyish good looks to the role of Shawn MacArthur, a young man who is trying to make a living selling iPods ...
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| Fighting Elegy (Kenka erejii) [DVD] |
The film is set in Japan in the early 1930s, a crucial period for modern Japanese history in which the kind of militaristic imperialism that would lead the country to side with Nazi Germany and ...
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| Finding Forrester |
Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester opens in avant-garde fashion, with a quickglimpse of the clapboard snapping as someone off-screen yells "Action," and the openingcredits rolls over forlorn ...
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| Finding Nemo |
It’s bound to happen one of this days. It has to. Eventually, if Pixar Animation Studios continues making feature-length computer-animated films, they’re going to make a bad one. It just ...
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| Finding Neverland |
That is the stuff Finding Neverland thrives on. The film's grand theme is the power of imagination, and first-time screenwriter David Magee, working from the aptly titled play The Man Who ...
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| Fire Down Below |
Expanding the environmental pose he struck in 1994's "On Deadly Ground," Seagal plays, of all things, an agent of the Environmental Protection Agency. After receiving some anonymous tips, he begins ...
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| Fired Up! |
As mentioned, the story revolves around two high school football players and best buds, Shawn and Nick (Nicholas D’Agosto, who looks like a young Scott Baio, and Eric Christian Olsen, who looks ...
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| Firehouse Dog [DVD] |
On the face of it, Firehouse Dog, a kid's movie about a pampered movie-star pooch who ends up saving a small firehouse from being shut down, wouldn't seem like a major contender in the ...
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| First Man Into Space [DVD] |
First Man Into Space is somewhat unique in terms of its timing: It was made during the heated beginnings of the Space Race, when the United States and the Soviet Union were fast and furious ...
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| Fists in the Pocket (I Pugni in tasca) [DVD] |
The youthful protagonist, Alessandro, is introduced in the film jumping from a tree, literally falling into the frame from above like he was dropped from the ether. Alessandro (who is variously ...
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| Flags of Our Fathers |
Every American is familiar with Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic image of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo ...
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| Flesh for Frankenstein (aka Andy Warhol's Frankenstein) |
Of course, there’s much more here than first meets the eye; Morrissey has always been a highly political artist, and the beauty of his films is that they are not as simple as they originally ...
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| Flightplan |
Unless, of course, she didn’t exist in the first place. This is the twist screenwriters Peter A. Dowling and Billy Ray throw into the works, thus making the story hinge for a long period of time ...
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| Floating Weeds / A Story of Floating Weeds [DVD] |
A Story of Floating Weeds, however, was different. It was a drama, rather than a comedy (and a fairly bitter and sad one, at that), and it for the first time evoked Ozu’s insistent theme ...
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| Food, Inc. |
The idea for Food, Inc. came from director Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser, the journalist whose 2001 food industry exposé Fast Food Nation supplies the basic template. Schlosser ...
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| For All Mankind [Blu-Ray] |
In many ways, For All Mankind is the essence of a pure documentary in the way it presents a unique experience with as little overt and attention-grabbing manipulation as possible. All of the ...
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| For Your Consideration |
Unfortunately, Hollywood has been skewered on-screen so many times by so many filmmakers good and bad that For Your Consideration ends up being hampered by familiarity. Guest's previous ...
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| Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits) [DVD] |
Rejecting the tendency to view children as idealized ciphers of human innocence, Clément uses them to depict just how fragile humanity is in the face of war. Taking place in 1940, as the Germans ...
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| Forgetting Sarah Marshall |
Directed by first-timer Nicholas Stoller, another veteran of the Apatow-produced television series Undeclared, and written by star Jason Segel, Forgetting Sarah Marshall follows the ...
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| Forrest Gump [DVD] |
The movie covers a broad swath of 20th-century American history from the 1950s until the early 1980s as seen through the eyes of a simple man born and raised in Greenbough, Alabama, named Forrest ...
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| Four of the Apocalypse (I Quattro dell'apocalisse) [DVD] |
Lucio Fulci's Four of the Apocalypse (I Quattro dell'apocalisse) is one of the best of the late Spaghetti Westerns. ...
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| Fracture |
The seemingly open-and-shut nature of the case is the primary reason that Willy Beachum (Ryan Gosling, fresh off his Oscar nomination for Half-Nelson), a cocksure young attorney in the ...
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| Frailty |
Frailty is a thriller about the horrors involved in following the dire commandments of a vengeful god. Told in flashback through the mouth of an unreliable narrator, it spins a dark tale about ...
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| Freaks |
Running just over an hour in length, "Freaks" tells the story of Hans (Harry Earles), a dwarf man-child who works in Mme. Tetrallini's traveling carnival as one the side-show attractions. Like the ...
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| Freddy Got Fingered |
Critics and pundits have responded to comedian Tom Green's Freddy GotFingered, which he directed, co-wrote, and stars in, and they are appalled, I tell you,appalled. Shocked. Outraged. ...
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| Freddy vs. Jason [DVD] |
Gory and silly as it is, Freddy vs. Jason is a movie that was long in the making—a decade, in fact. Ever since the ending of 1993’s Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (which, of ...
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| Freeway |
The Red Riding Hood in "Freeway" comes in the form of Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon), a fifteen-year-old foul-mouthed, illiterate pyromaniacal kleptomaniac who wears too much eye make-up and is ...
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| French Connection II [Blu-Ray] |
Most importantly, the setting has been moved from the Big Apple to Marseilles, France, and even though it has just as much grit, garbage, and malfeasance, the European environs produce a radical ...
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| Frenzy [DVD] |
Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, Frenzy, marked his first return to England
after more than 20 years of filmmaking in Hollywood. In many ways, Frenzy was
a return to Hitchcock's ...
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| Frequency |
Although it is otherwise quite good, "Frequency" starts off on a bad note. It opens with a hectic, confusing, and disorienting action sequence that has something to do with a tanker truck that has ...
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| Friday Night Lights |
Friday Night Lights, based on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H.R. Bissinger’s 1989 book of the same title, has many things in common with Hoosiers, except the focus is on Texas ...
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| Friday the 13th (1980) [Blu-Ray] |
A self-consciously avowed knock-off of John Carpenter’s masterful nightmare Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th has always been a scorned and derided film, with its mixture of shallow ...
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| Friday the 13th (2009) |
While the screenplay was penned by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, who also cowrote the jokey meta-horror smackdownFreddy vs. Jason (2003), this new version of Friday the 13th bears the ...
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| Friday the 13th Part 2 [Blu-Ray] |
However, that wasn’t enough to stop writer Ron Kurz, who also scripted Cunningham’s follow-up film, 1981’s Eyes of a Stranger, and director Steve Miner, who had worked as an associate ...
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| Friday the 13th Part 2 [DVD] |
However, that wasn’t enough to stop writer Ron Kurz, who also scripted Cunningham’s follow-up film, 1981’s Eyes of a Stranger, and director Steve Miner, who had worked as an associate ...
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| Friday the 13th Part III [Blu-Ray] |
As it turned out, the answer was to be found in one of the oldest gimmicks in the book: 3-D, which had been used in the 1950s to draw audiences away from their new television sets and back to the ...
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| Friday the 13th Part III [DVD] |
As it turned out, the answer was to be found in one of the oldest gimmicks in the book: 3-D, which had been used in the 1950s to draw audiences away from their new television sets and back to the ...
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| Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning [DVD] |
Granted, Part V had a tough job to do, following its misleadingly titled predecessor Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter and having to come up with the “new beginning” its own title ...
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| Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives [DVD] |
Completely disregarding the final shot of A New Beginning and aiming for a complete reboot of the series, Jason Lives opens with Tommy Jarvis (now played by Thom Matthews) racing out ...
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| Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood [DVD] |
By the seventh installment of the illimitable Friday the 13th franchise, it seemed that any hope for originality or innovation was long gone, if it had ever existed to begin with. As a new ...
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| Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan [DVD] |
By the seventh installment of the illimitable Friday the 13th franchise, it seemed that any hope for originality or innovation was long gone, if it had ever existed to begin with. As a new ...
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| Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter [DVD] |
Regardless of its intentions, The Final Chapter remains one of the favorites among fans, if only because it returned the series to a gorier, more expressly horrific tone after the lousy ...
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| Friends |
The story revolves around two young teenagers, a fifteen-year-old English boy named Paul Harrison (Sean Bury) and a fourteen-year-old French girl named Michelle La Tour (Anicée Alvina). Paul's ...
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| Fritz the Cat [DVD] |
For his first film, writer/director Ralph Bakshi decided to do what no one else had ever tried before: Create a feature-length adult cartoon. Bakshi, an animation wunderkind who was already a ...
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| From Dusk Till Dawn |
It was scripted by Quentin Tarantino (if you don't know who he is by now, you might as well stay in whatever cave you just crawled out of) and directed by Robert Rodriguez (the UT film student who ...
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| From Hell |
Some 114 years after he murdered at least five women in London's East End, we still do not know for sure who Jack the Ripper was. He remains a shadowy figure of both history and myth, and although ...
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| From Paris With Love |
Travolta’s Charlie Wax is paired with James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), who is currently working as an aid to the U.S. Ambassador (Richard Durde), but has aspirations of working dangerous ...
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| Frost/Nixon |
The grand irony, of course, was that the interviews were televised, and television had never been Richard Nixon’s friend (he always blamed his loss--rightly, perhaps--in the 1960 election to his ...
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| Full Frontal |
Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal sounded interesting on paper. Having burst onto the Hollywood scene with the Sundance favorite sex, lies, and videotape back in 1989, which became the ...
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| Funny Games |
Michael Haneke's Funny Games, a remake of his own chilling 1997 Austrian meta-thriller, is like the anti-Vanishing. Haneke has not only refused to soften in any way the effect of his ...
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| Funny People |
Taking a cue from P.T. Anderson, who recognized the depths of darkness in the infantile comedy of Adam Sandler and cast him in his quirky romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love (2002), Apatow taps ...
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