| Rabbit-Proof Fence |
There are few things more amazing in the known world than the resilience of a determined human being, regardless of age. Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence is a testament to the human will, ...
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| Race to Witch Mountain |
Following his performance as a football star in the family-friendly The Game Plan (2007) and his self-effacing supporting role as a too-good-to-be-true secret agent in Get Smart ...
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| Racing With the Moon [DVD] |
The story is set in a small town on the California coast in the winter of 1942, just as the U.S. draft is kicking into high gear for World War II. Penn plays 17-year-old Henry “Hopper” Nash, an ...
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| Raiders of the Lost Ark (Adventure Collection) [DVD] |
The key to the success of Raiders of the Lost Ark is the character of Indiana Jones, perfectly cast and played by Harrison Ford, then best known as the rugged and sardonic smuggler Han Solo ...
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| Raiders of the Lost Ark [DVD] |
Inspired by the cliffhanging Republic serials of the 1930s, Raiders of the Lost Ark, the brainchild of wunderkinds George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, arguably the two most important cinematic ...
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| Rambo |
As a cultural monument, he is best remembered as the cartoonishly buff instrument of American vengeance in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), the Reagan-era megahit in which the Vietnam ...
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| Ran [DVD] |
What makes the sequence hover at such lyrical heights is Kurosawa’s denial of sound. We don’t get the harsh, ugly noises of battle--guns firing, swords clanging, armor creaking, horses ...
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| Random Hearts |
Kristen Scott Thomas must truly relish starring in long, melancholy romantic epics opposite quiet, brooding leading men. In 1996, she starred opposite a quiet, brooding Ralph Fiennes in "The English ...
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| Ransom |
With a sort of ruthless intensity offset with slick Hollywood polish, director Ron Howard ("Apollo 13," "Backdraft") has essentially fashioned a drama-thriller exploring all parents' worst nightmare ...
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| Rashomon [DVD] |
Who is lying and who isn't? The masterstroke of Kurosawa's film is that it doesn't matter. Rashomon is not about "truth" and "lies." Rather, it is about the interrelation of experience ...
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| Ratatouille |
Ratatouille marks the return of Brad Bird, who directed Pixar's 2004 hit The Incredibles and before that worked on The Simpsons and directed The Iron Giant (1999), one ...
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| Ratcatcher [DVD] |
Lynne Ramsey's feature debut Ratcatcher won't win any awards for originality of subject matter—after all, the pains of adolescence in the lower economic strata depicted in a social-realist ...
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| Ravenous |
Guy Pearce--whose long hair and scruffy goatee make him look world's apart from the straight-laced, no-nonsense cop he played in "L.A. Confidential" (1997)--stars as Captain John Boyd, an officer in ...
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| Re-Animator [DVD] |
Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, based on a series of six stories by pulp master H.P. Lovecraft, is a giddy, gory horror-comedy filled with audaciously grotesque special effects and witty black ...
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| Real Women Have Curves |
In Real Women Have Curves, 18-year-old newcomer America Ferrera does a lot of exasperated sighing and angry eye-rolling as Ana, a bright and ambitious young woman who has just graduated from ...
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| Rebecca [DVD] |
There is little doubt that Hitchcock would have eventually made it to Hollywood even if Selznick hadn't signed him to a seven-year contract in 1938 (especially given the rapidly collapsing state of ...
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| Red Beard (Akahige) [DVD] |
Red Beard (Akahige) marked the final collaboration between director Akira Kurosawa and actor Toshiro Mifune. Since 1948, they had worked together on 15 films, including such ...
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| Red Desert (Il deserto rosso) [DVD] |
At that time, Antonioni was a critic, but he would soon direct his first feature film, and by the mid-1960s he was a legendary figure in the art cinema world, having garnered both acclaim and ...
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| Red Dragon |
After the self-conscious irony and black comedy of Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2000), it is something of a relief to see director Brett Ratner take Red Dragon, which is a prequel to ...
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| Red Eye |
I don't want to give away too much of the plot because part of the movie's pleasure is the way it slowly unfolds its secrets, so suffice it say that Rachel McAdams (The Notebook) plays Lisa ...
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| Redbelt [Blu-Ray] |
So it is with Redbelt, which is not a great Mamet film, but is a relentlessly intriguing and entertaining one. Like many of his narratives, this one takes a number of unexpected turns in ...
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| Reds [DVD] |
Beatty had wanted to make a film about the journalist and socialist agitator John Reed, one of only two Americans to be buried in the Kremlin wall, for more than 10 years, and you can tell that the ...
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| Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children) [DVD] |
>When it was first released in 1936, Reefer Madness, originally known as ...
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| Reign of Fire |
There is a lot of talk about ashes in Reign of Fire, which is appropriate because the movie looks like it was filmed through a perpetual haze of the stuff. This is not necessarily a ...
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| Reindeer Games |
After seeing "Reindeer Games," I'm not sure whether to congratulate screenwriter Ehren Kruger or berate him. On the one hand, he has written a script that twists and turns in ways that are impossible ...
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| Remember the Titans |
Remember the Titans uses the sports movie formula to tell the true story offorced integration in an Alexandria, Virginia, high school in 1971. The script by first-timewriter Gregory Allen ...
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| Repo Man [DVD] |
"The life of a repo man is always intense," the experienced veteran tells the rookie at one
point in Alex Cox's cult classic "Repo Man." Of course, the rookie, a suburban teenage
punk named Otto ...
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| Repulsion [DVD] |
It is hard to disagree with Butler’s assessment of Polanski’s sophomore feature, especially for admirers of the horror genre who recognize that so many horror films are cheap and easy, settling ...
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| Requiem for a Dream |
Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream is a harrowing descent into the worldof addiction. It plays like a downward spiral, watching as the dreams of its characters areslowly blighted out as ...
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| Rescue Dawn |
Herzog has always been drawn to extremes--human and natural--so it is little surprise that he was compelled to return to Dengler's story again, embodying as it does so many of the themes that have ...
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| Reservation Road |
For each of these men, self-preservation is crucial. While Ethan's wife, Grace (Jennifer Connelly), grieves for her lost son and then pulls herself together and moves forward with her life, he ...
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| Reservoir Dogs |
Taking a note from Sam Peckinpah, Tarantino populated his film with morally ambiguous outlaws. Yes, these are criminals and killers, but damn, if they aren't charming and charismatic. Any chance we ...
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| Resident Evil |
Based a wildly popular video-game series, Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil is a gory, ultra-nihilistic sci-fi horrorshow that is essentially a futuristic Night of the Living Dead ...
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| Resident Evil: Apocalypse |
Of course, that didn't stop them from making Resident Evil: Apocalypse, which continues the story with increasingly diminishing results. For those not familiar, Apocalypse picks up ...
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| Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story [DVD] |
Stax was founded by the unlikely team of Jim Stewart, a country music fiddler, and his sister Estelle Axton, who had a knack for understanding new musical trends. They took the first two letters of ...
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| Return of the Fly [DVD] |
A better title would have been Son of the Fly, as the sequel focuses on Phillippe, the son of Andre Delambre, the tragic scientist who, in attempting to transfer matter through space in the ...
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| Return to Horror High [DVD] |
The movie credits four writers on the script, which could explain why it devolves slowly but surely into near incoherence by the final reel. It starts off well enough, though, in maintaining a ...
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| Return to Me |
"Return to Me" is a surprisingly moving film--something of an old-fashioned throwback to the romantic formula of the '40s and '50s--that literalizes the metaphor of the heart being the seat of the ...
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| Revanche [DVD] |
Revanche tells the story of two couples from opposite sides of the law and how their lives intersect and intertwine, first tragically, but then with the promise of possible redemption. Alex ...
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| Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise [DVD] |
As I finished watching Revenge of the Nerds, it occurred to me that
I had no idea where the word nerd came from. According to The Barnhart
Dictionary of Etymology, ...
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| Revenge of the Nerds [DVD] |
I bring this up not to turn a review of a mid-’80s gross-out college satire into an exercise in academic pedantry, but to help illuminate some of what is happening in Revenge of the Nerds ...
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| Revolutionary Road |
More than forty years later that stance is not so radical; it is, in fact, very nearly a cliché. But that hasn’t stopped Revolutionary Road from making it to the big screen with ...
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| Ride With the Devil [DVD] |
Unlike many Civil War epics, which tend to focus on the terrible grandeur of massive battlefields, Ride With the Devil stages its action on the fringes of the war, specifically the savage ...
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| Rififi (Du rififi chez les hommes) [DVD] |
Whenever anyone writes or talks about Jules Dassin's Rififi (Du rififi chez
les hommes), the discussion inevitable centers on the heist sequence. And why not? ...
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| Righteous Kill |
Sadly, this doesn’t come as much of a surprise because both De Niro and Pacino have been on a slide lately, cashing paychecks for movies that wouldn’t have even gotten to their desks in the ...
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| River's Edge [DVD] |
Even in post-Columbine America, when it has become a tragic regularity to hear of children
and teenagers committing acts of the most violent sort, River's Edge, Tim Hunter's
1986 study of ...
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| Road to Perdition |
Road to Perdition, director Sam Mendes' follow-up to his 1999 Oscar-winning hit American Beauty, is a stately, elegant gangster film, beautifully directed and somehow both moving and ...
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| Road Trip |
If vulgarity is an art form, then "Road Trip" aims to a masterpiece. Obscene and often quite funny, "Road Trip" is a direct descendent of the "Animal House"-inspired comedies of the 1980s cross-bred ...
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| Robin Hood |
Since there have been more than a hundred cinematic incarnations of the legendary bandit of Sherwood Forest (not to mention the hundreds, if not thousands, of appearances in prose form, beginning ...
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| Robinsin Crusoe on Mars [DVD] |
Not surprisingly, then, Mars has appeared frequently in the movies, starting as early as Thomas Edison’s 1910 short film A Trip to Mars, which imagined the planet as being home to scary ...
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| RoboCop |
However, when audiences went to see it, they were surprised to find an extremely well-made, often humorous comic book revenge fantasy with an underlying subtext of constant satirical jabs at American ...
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| Robots |
More to the point, though, is the characters themselves, all of whom are, obviously, robots. Robots takes place in an alternate world in which everyone and everything is mechanical. Babies ...
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| Rock Star |
Based loosely on the true story of Tim "Ripper" Owens, an office-equipment salesman from Ohio who was chosen to fill the empty spot left by Rob Halford when he quit in 1993 as lead singer of the ...
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| Rocky Balboa |
Now, as a has-been movie star who hasn’t had a genuine hit in more than a decade, Stallone gives us Rocky Balboa, the sixth installment of the 30-year-old Rocky franchise, to once ...
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| Roger Dodger |
In first-time writer/director Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger, Campbell Scott, who is known primarily for playing ordinary and decent characters, gives a bold, bravura performance as Roger ...
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| Role Models |
The “role models” of the title are Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott), two stuck-in-a-rut thirtysomethings who make a living by driving a huge truck tricked out to look like a ...
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| Roman Holiday [DVD] |
In 1953, nobody knew who Audrey Hepburn was. She had played some minor roles in a handful of movies, but she was, for all intents and purposes, an unknown. ...
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| Rome Open City (Roma città aperta) [DVD] |
Yet, it wasn’t long (especially after the film took home the top prize at the first Cannes Film Festival) before audiences, both Italian and international, began to recognize what a profound ...
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| Romeo + Juliet [DVD] |
Baz Luhrmann's updated version of William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet starts in high gear, pushes itself into overdrive, and eventually redlines and blows the engine long before its over. ...
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| Romy and Michele's High School Reunion |
Although I will probably never find out, I got a pretty good jolt of '80's nostalgia courtesy of "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion," a hilarious movie that's really much smarter than its ...
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| Ronin [DVD] |
Ronin is about a group of such men--mercenaries, guns for hire--who are brought together by an Irish rebel fighter, Dierdre (Natascha McElhone), to pull off a complex heist. None of the men ...
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| Rosemary's Baby [DVD] |
Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby is a masterpiece of paranoid tension about evil
lurking in the mundane. It has been called "the horror film without any horror," and much is
made of the fact ...
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| Rounders |
The movie is replete with all kinds of insider lingo that goes a long way toward painting a thoroughly convincing portrait of the gambling world. For instance, the title, "Rounders," refers to the ...
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| Rules of Engagement |
William Friedkin's "Rules of Engagement" is a deeply troubling film that is also (for better of for worse) very entertaining. Friedkin's other troubling films, such as the homosexual serial killer ...
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| Rumble in the Bronx (Hong Faan Kui) |
Ever since his American debut in 1980 in "The Big Brawl," Hong Kong martial arts sensation Jackie Chan has been trying to cross over into American cinema. He's made over a hundred films in his ...
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| Run Lola Run |
Like so many crises, it begins with a panicked phone call. Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a courier for a powerful drug dealer, calls his girlfriend, Lola (Franka Potente), because he has just lost ...
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| Running Scared [DVD] |
What he misses, however, is the connection to reality that defined the movies that served as his inspiration. Running Scared is a whacked-out criminal fantasy, and to some extent Kramer ...
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| Rush Hour |
The movie's tag line promises the bringing together of "the fastest hands in the East" and "the biggest mouth in the West." The hands, of course, belong to Jackie Chan, the speedy martial arts ...
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| Rush Hour 2 |
Rumor has it there were severe script problems with Rush Hour 2 and most of the movie was improvised during production. It shows.
Rush Hour 2 reunites the unlikely but fruitful comic ...
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| Rushmore [DVD] |
There is a moment near the middle of Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" when a character makes a statement that essentially sums up the appeal of the film itself. Speaking to the film's protagonist, ...
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| Ryder P.I. [DVD] |
Ryder P.I. is an excruciatingly unfunny comedy about a couple of inept private detectives. The movie was an amateur production shot on video in the mid-1980s by a group of comedians from Long ...
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