| L' Avventura [DVD] |
Every 10 years, the British film journal Sight & Sound conducts an extensive poll
of critics to determine the 10 greatest films ever made. Although the list changes quite a bit
from decade to ...
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| L'Enfant [DVD] |
Six years after winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Rosetta (1999), the powerful tale of an angry young woman and her alcoholic mother, the Dardennes took home ...
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| L.A. Confidential |
Based on the mammoth crime epic of the same title by James Ellroy, "L.A. Confidential" paints a colorful, textured, violent, and enthralling portrait of Los Angeles and its struggling police ...
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| La bête humaine [DVD] |
The story centers around Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin), a train engineer who is literally doomed before birth by his flawed heredity. In a rather tacky, long opening scroll, we are informed that ...
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| La Collectionneuse (The Collector) [DVD] |
La Collectionneuse presented many firsts for Rohmer. It was the first feature-length “Moral Tale” and his first film to be shot in color by the soon-to-be-great cinematographer Nestor ...
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| La Commare secca [DVD] |
Working from Pasolini's story, Bertolucci (who had already published an award-winning book of poetry) and cowriter Sergio Citti (who had cowritten Pasolini's debut, 1961's Accattone) took the ...
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| La Femme Nikita |
The Nikita of the title is a true femme fatal played with ferocious intensity and whetted sexuality by Anne Parillaud. When we first meet her, she is a strung-out druggie traveling with a band of ...
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| La Haine (Hate) [DVD] |
Kassovitz, who began in film as an actor before turning to writing and directing, builds his episodic narrative around a trio of friends in their early 20s living in the banlieue districts ...
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| La Pointe Courte [DVD] |
Looking back at it now, most scholars recognize with 20/20 hindsight that Varda’s first feature film La Point Courte is a quintessential forerunner to most of the visual and thematic ...
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| La ronde [DVD] |
La ronde, which was based on a scandalous play written by Arthur Schnitzler in 1900 but not staged in his native Vienna for another two decades, gives new meaning to the term ...
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| Lacombe, Lucien [DVD] |
Throughout the film, characters speak about Lucien and how he doesn’t fit the profile of a turncoat and torturer. “He’s a good boy,” his mother says, rather desperately, on more than one ...
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| Lady in the Water |
But, more than anything, Lady in the Water is a work of great hubris--a jaw-dropping exercise in which a populist artist tests his audience’s limits. Will they swallow this pill whole or ...
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| Lake Placid |
"Lake Placid" is a silly, jokey, utterly forgettable but not unwatchable creature feature about a 30-foot crocodile that has
apparently swum all the way from Asia and taken up residence in a ...
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| Lakeview Terrace |
Because he is played by Jackson, Abel is the clear centerpiece of the movie, a hyperrealized vat of contradictions who is as infuriating as he in intriguing. In essence, Abel is a striking character ...
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| Lancelot of the Lake (Lancelot du Lac) |
Bresson begins his tale as the Knights of the Round Table are returning, decimated, after failing Merlin's command to retrieve the Holy Grail, the mystical cup that was filled with Christ's blood. ...
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| Land of the Dead |
Land of the Dead continues some of these same ideological concerns, but is unmistakably a product of the post-9/11 years and our escalating fears of terrorism. It is not without note that ...
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| Land of the Lost |
That’s pretty much how I felt through the entirety of Land of the Lost as it laboriously did everything in its power to throw goofy entertainment my way and failed at virtually every turn. ...
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| Lara Croft: Tomb Raider |
When are they going to figure it out? How many bad movies based on popular video games
does Hollywood have to make before they finally figure out that animated computer games,
especially ones that ...
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| Last Summer |
But every once in a while, a film comes along that bucks these ideas, and Frank Perry's little-seen 1969 film "Last Summer" is one of them. It defies the trend by using teenagers, who are complex, ...
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| Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) [DVD] |
The story is purposefully, almost blatantly, simple in construction, yet so fundamentally open to interpretation that it can sustain virtually any reading you want to apply to it. The entirety of ...
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| Late Marriage (Hatuna Meuhet) |
Dover Koshashvili’s feature directorial debut, Late Marriage (Hatuna Meuhet), is a blistering (and often funny) critique of conservative family traditionalism intruding on the realm ...
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| Late Spring (Banshun) [DVD] |
Late Spring, which was Ozu’s first film to explore domesticity in the postwar era, is the story of the relationship between Shukichi, a widowed professor, his grown daughter, Noriko. ...
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| Laws of Attraction |
Unfortunately, their vehicle of choice was a poor one, as Laws of Attraction tries desperately, but unsuccessfully, to ape the refined battle-of-the-sexes hilarity of such films as the ...
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| Layer Cake |
Unfortunately, as every film noir has taught us, the protagonist’s desires almost always run counter to the way the world actually works, and Layer Cake quickly turns into a ...
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| Le bonheur [DVD] |
Le bonheur is the story of what happens to a picture-perfect family--handsome carpenter husband and father, pretty dressmaking wife and mother, and two golden-haired tots--when the husband ...
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| Le Cercle Rouge [DVD] |
Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) was the second-to-last of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 13 films. Always a fiercely independent artist who worked as his own producer largely outside of the ...
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| Le deuxième soufflé [DVD] |
The film opens in the midst of a prison break, which immediately establishes the film’s emphasis on physicality and abstraction instead of obvious exposition (not a word is spoken for nearly 10 ...
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| Le doulos [DVD] |
Le doulos was based on the 1957 novel by Pierre Lesou, who reportedly said that he preferred Melville’s film adaptation to his book. The story, in both novel and film, is a densely packed ...
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| Le plaisir [DVD] |
Le plaisir (which means “the House of Pleasure”) is the kind of film your savor, so full of life, creativity, and sly ironic commentary. Ophuls was a world-renowned visual stylist whose ...
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| Le Samouraï [DVD] |
Melville’s hero in Le Samouraï is Jef Costello (Alain Delon), the “samurai” of the title, albeit not in the sense that we typically think. Jef is not defined by nobility of purpose or ...
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| Leaving Las Vegas |
That statement sums up Ben's mental framework. Not much information is given, but early on we learn that his wife and child have left him, his screenwriting career has hit rock bottom, and he has ...
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| Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, & Blonde |
There’s a Saturday Night Live skit from about 10 years ago in which Victoria Jackson, that paragon of cliché blonde vapidity, goes on “Weekend Update” and gives a commentary on why ...
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| Legally Blonde [DVD] |
The giddy, effervescent pop comedy Legally Blonde is the result of a collision between the two polar ends of the intellectual stereotype spectrum. On one side, we have the intellectually ...
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| Legend: The Director's Cut [DVD] |
There are some films that simply need time before they are appreciated. For whatever reason, when first released, they simply fail to connect with audiences and critics. Sometimes they are ahead of ...
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| Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne [DVD] |
Robert Bresson is most often thought of as an uncompromising minimalist, a director whose unique (to some maddening) aesthetic insisted on unprofessional actors, flat dialogue, simple camerawork, ...
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| Les enfants terribles [DVD] |
The film was based on a 1929 novel by Cocteau (probably his most famous), and Melville directed it as if Cocteau were behind the camera, even if that actually happened on only one day of shooting ...
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| Les Misérables |
At roughly two hours and twenty minutes, "Les Misérables" feels much longer than it actually is. The story itself spans almost three decades and numerous major characters, but that is not why the ...
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| Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (Fin de semana para los muertos) (aka The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue) [DVD] |
When Jorge Grau's Let Sleeping Corpses Lie ( Fin de semana para los
muertos) was first released in 1974, ripping off George A. Romero's Night of the
Living Dead (1968) was not ...
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| Lethal Weapon 4 |
This fourth time around, Riggs and Murtaugh find themselves up against Asian bad guys who illegally import indentured slaves and run an elaborate counterfeiting business. Since the first installment ...
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| Letters From Iwo Jima |
Eastwood opens the film with solemn shots of Iwo Jima in the present, its blackish volcanic sand beaches looking virtually unchanged from sixty years earlier. The remnants of bombed out tanks and ...
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| Liar Liar |
Carrey plays Fletcher Reede, a habitally fibbing lawyer trying desperately to become partner at his sleazy, big money lawfirm. Fletcher's lying is an everyday part of life, whether that be telling ...
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| Life |
Murphy stars as Ray Gibson, a fast-talking, small-time hood in Harlem in 1932. Through bad luck and circumstance, he ends up driving to Mississippi with Claude Banks (Martin Lawrence), an uptight ...
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| Life is Beautiful (La Vita é Bella) |
Benigni is one of Italy's most popular movie stars, but he is known primarily in America by the few who saw him in bit roles in "Down by Law" and "Night on Earth," and the 25 people who actually saw ...
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| Lifeboat [DVD] |
Unlike most of Hitchcock’s films, Lifeboat is not a thriller, per se. Granted, it has elements of the thriller, particularly the inevitable suspense generated when a group of people are ...
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| Lilo & Stitch |
Disney's advertising campaign for its new animated sci-fi comedy Lilo & Stitch is desperate to convince us that the movie is a change from the traditional Disney formula. Whether it be the ...
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| Lions for Lambs |
The film weaves together three interrelated plots all happening at the same time over several hours. In Washington, D.C., hotshot young Republican senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) has granted an ...
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| Little Big Man [DVD] |
Few directors have become so absolutely central to the American cinema and then obsolete with the speed and intensity of Arthur Penn. Like other important directors of the 1960s, including Sam ...
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| Little Children |
Like so much of the film itself, the title is darkly ironic. While there is a great deal of concern for young children in the literal sense (in the background, you can almost hear Rev. Lovejoy’s ...
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| Little Miss Sunshine [DVD] |
The story is about the Hoover clan's 800-mile trip from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Redondo Beach, California. Seven-year-old Olive (Abigail Breslin), the family's youngest member and only ...
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| Little Nicky |
At this point in his movie career, Adam Sandler has mostly
played either one of two roles: obnoxious, irresponsible
loudmouths (Happy Gilmore, Big Daddy) or
shy, inept losers (The ...
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| Live Free or Die Hard |
Perhaps that's why it's been a dozen years since McClane last blasted his way across the silver screen, grumpy and recalcitrant as ever. In that time, of course, we had the terrible events of 9/11, ...
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| Lola Montès [DVD] |
Like La ronde, the narrative in Lola Montès is structured with a highly theatrical and imminently self-conscious device, in this case a grandiose American circus directed by Peter ...
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| Lone Star |
Independent writer/director John Sayles ("City of Hope," "Passion Fish") has fashioned an incredibly
diverse, complex, and intriguing film that explores a multitude of subjects, enough to fill at ...
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| Looking For Mr. Goodbar |
Brooks gives us numerous reasons to explain Theresa's dangerous and often stupid behavior when it comes to sex with strange men. Some of it is due to the Freudian relationship with her overbearing ...
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| Lords of Dogtown |
For those not in the know, "Dogtown" was the nickname for Venice Beach, California, also referred to as the "ghetto by the sea." Basically a dilapidated Coney Island-style boardwalk and amusement ...
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| Lorna's Silence (Le silence de Lorna) [DVD] |
Lorna (newcomer Arta Dobroshi) is a young Albanian woman who has just recently been granted citizenship in Belgium after marrying a Belgian heroin junkie named Claudy (Jérémie Renier, who played ...
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| Loser |
Poor Paul. A gentle, decent Midwestern farm kid who finds himself without a clue in the middle of New York City for his freshman
year in college, his life is one excruciating embarrassment after ...
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| Lost in Space |
However, if I did, I don't remember it, so it's pointless for me to compare the TV show to the new $70 million movie that is based on it, or spun off it, or however they want to describe it. All I ...
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| Lost in Translation |
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a beautiful, lyrical cinematic ode to lost souls finding each in an unlikely place. In this case, it is a burnt-out movie star and a lonely young ...
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| Louie Bluie [DVD] |
The subsequent film, Louie Bluie, will speak to anyone who appreciates music history and likes to dig into the deepest roots of Americana in the form of street jazz, string blues, gospel, ...
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| Louisiana Story [DVD] |
Robert Flaherty was never a conventional documentary filmmaker, and his films, although routinely referred to as “documentaries,” were often highly fictionalized works that used real-life ...
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| Love Actually |
As the title suggests, Richard Curtis’Love Actually is, quite simply, about love. Not just your standard romantic variety of love (though there is plenty of that to be found), but also the ...
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| Love and Death on Long Island |
"Love and Death on Long Island" is about this very subject, but it goes about it in a peculiar and surprising way. The object of affection is a B-movie star named Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestly), ...
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| Love in the Afternoon (L'Amour l'après-midi) [DVD] |
The fact that Love in the Afternoon is fundamentally and thoroughly about the realm of adulthood--burdened as it is with responsibility and duties--gives the film a feeling of maturity and ...
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| Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky) [DVD] |
While the filmmakers of the French New Wave were heralded for their politically minded subversions of the Hollywood "invisible" style of continuity and the Italian Neorealists were praised for the ...
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| Lucky Number Slevin |
A major twist--no, the major twist--in Lucky Number Slevin relies entirely on the audience assuming that a long-winded story told near the beginning of the film is either fabricated ...
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| Luminarias |
The title of Luminarias comes from a fictional Los Angeles restaurant in which four women in their early 40s regularly gather to discuss their lives--sex, love, marriage, infidelity, work, ...
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