| W. |
As he did with World Trade Center (2006), his other stab at cinematically rendering history in the Dubya era, Stone tamps down his more radical aesthetic proclivities, which in this case ...
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| W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films [DVD] |
From 1915 to 1945, William Claude Dukenfield, better known as W.C. Fields, starred in 40 films, 11 in the silent era and 29 in the sound era. Along with Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold ...
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| Wag the Dog |
"Wag the Dog" runs on the idea that Americans believe everything they see on TV. When told that something on television isn't necessarily true, one of the film's central characters repeatedly says, ...
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| Wait Until Dark |
The screen version, directed by Terence Young, is also thoroughly contrived, but it is a perfect example of how mood, atmosphere, music, and direction can overcome plot weaknesses. "Wait Until Dark" ...
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| Waking Life [DVD] |
Richard Linklater has complained that there aren't enough ideas in movies these days--that is, beyond the idea of the "high concept," in which you can summarize everything a movie is about in two ...
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| Waking Ned Devine |
But, that doesn't stop the populace of the tiny Irish hamlet Tulaigh Mohr (or Tully More)--all 52 of them--from trying to cash in on Ned's fortune (or is that misfortune?). Led by two spirited ...
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| Walk the Line |
Yet, the movie itself is far better than its outline would suggest. Part of this is due to a pair of outstanding performances by Joaquin Phoenix as Cash and Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, his ...
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| Walkabout [DVD] |
The script by British playwright Edward Bond, who had previously written the English language dialogue for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), is a relatively loose adaptation of a 1959 ...
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| Walking Tall |
The name change is ultimately of no real consequence, but it is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the movie. The casting of former wrestling champion and rising action star The Rock has a ...
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| Wall Street [DVD] |
Douglas's Oscar-winning performance is a powerhouse of controlled aggression and vindictive cunning. Gekko, who rose from a city-college education to being one of the richest men in America, has no ...
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| Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit |
Brought to life via the painstaking process of plasticine stop-motion animation, there is a quirky sense of life to the Wallace and Gromit films. While the textures and slightly jerky ...
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| Wallace & Gromit: Three Amazing Adventures [DVD] |
When Nick Park started working on his first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, in the early 1980s, he was still a student who was doing every bit of the work by himself. For ...
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| WALL•E [Blu-Ray] |
Of course, said cockroach is only a secondary character, a squeaking sidekick to the titular robot, whose name stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter--Earth Class.” WALL•E is a squat, ...
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| Waltz With Bashir (Vals Im Bashir) [Blu-Ray] |
If one were to try to corner the film with generic descriptors, the most apt might be “antiwar psychological autobiography” because it emanates directly from the writer/director’s own ...
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| Wanted |
Obviously, not everyone can do this, which means that it's passed down genetically. However, you have to have someone point out your potential, which is why the next-generation assassin Wesley ...
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| War of the Worlds (2005) |
The worst in this case is an alien invasion, one that has been planned for millions of years because the enormous tripod alien machines used to eviscerate anything and everything in their paths ...
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| War, Inc. |
The story takes place almost entirely in the fictional country of Turaqistan, which has been taken over by Tamerlane, an enormous private American corporation headed by the former U.S. Vice ...
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| Watchmen |
It is thus not surprising, given the obvious need to make such a massive, complex project as commercial as possible, that it ultimately wound up in the hands of Zack Snyder, a filmmaker whose two ...
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| Water [DVD] |
Despite being a relatively gentle film (not to mention beautifully shot by Giles Nuttgens, who also shot the other films in the trilogy), it’s not hard to see why some would find Water so ...
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| We Were Soldiers [DVD] |
If there's one kind of military story American audiences love to see over and over again, it is the tale of the small group of diligent soldiers trapped and outnumbered by the enemy. It's the ...
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| Wedding Crashers [DVD] |
Wedding Crashers effectively has it both ways. It’s a split affair, with the first half rooted deeply in sarcastic cynicism and the second half digging out redemption for its seemingly ...
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| Welcome to Mooseport |
> Welcome to Mooseport is a political satire that wants to be ...
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| Welcome to the Dollhouse |
First of all, she's saddled with a last name like Wiener, which makes her an easy target for names such as "Wiener Dog" which her schoolmates have scrawled all over her locker. She has a crush on a ...
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| Wendy and Lucy [DVD] |
Reichardt and coscreenwriter Jonathan Raymond locate their story in the chilly dampness of the Pacific Northwest, where Lucy (Michele Williams), a young woman who is traveling from Indiana to Alaska ...
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| What Dreams May Come |
Because the afterlife is such a difficult-to-grasp, abstract concept mired in centuries of theological debate, it has been an almost irresistible topic of expression for artists--painters, poets, ...
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| What Lies Beneath |
It is rare when I find myself standing completely apart from the majority of the criticalcommunity in responding to a particular film, but frankly I cannot understand why somany critics have taken ...
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| What Planet Are You From? |
In "What Planet Are You From?," comedian Garry Shandling plays an alien posing as a human on Earth so he can mate with a woman, thus paving the way for his alien race to dominate Earth from within. ...
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| What Women Want [DVD] |
Playing Nick Marshall, the wealthy, successful, male-chauvinist Chicago ad executive in
What Women Want marks the first time Mel Gibson has played the lead role in a
straight romantic comedy. ...
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| What's Eating Gilbert Grape |
The film feels like Peter Bogdonavich's "The Last Picture Show," in the town's backward sleepiness, and the central character's unresolved restlessness. It creates a real sense of life, which ...
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| Whatever It Takes |
It is of little surprise that, in the recent rush to release as many teen-oriented comedies as possible over the last few years, filmmakers have almost completely dropped any notion of trying to ...
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| When Harry Met Sally... [DVD] |
When Harry Met Sally... is a film about how people meet and fall in love. While
many romantic films rely on the concept of love at first sight or the tradition of instant,
unbridled passion ...
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| When Worlds Collide [DVD] |
As Kim Newman points out in Apocalypse Movies, his encyclopedic study of end-of-the-world cinema, movies about the planet Earth being threatened from the heavens by rogue planets and giant ...
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| Where the Heart Is [DVD] |
"Where the Heart Is" is a shamelessly contrived melodrama with so many bizarre plot twists and tragic occurrences--desertion, child abuse, child kidnapping, a killer tornado, insanity, alcoholism, ...
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| Where the Wild Things Are |
Jonze and Eggers keep the basic scenario, but add in details that help explain why young Max (Max Records) feels so alone in the world. He has an older sister (Pepita Emmerichs) who is clearly not ...
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| Whip and the Body (La frusta e il corpo) [DVD] |
Mario Bava began his career as a cinematographer on some 40 films before taking his place
in the director's chair for the first time with 1960's Black Sunday (La
maschera del demonio). ...
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| White Dog [DVD] |
After all, this was a film that I knew only through dubbed videocassettes and DVD-Rs I had procured from collectors who had European video copies or had recorded it off television, oftentimes with ...
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| White Noise |
That is one of the primary problems with what I call the PG-13ization of horror movies, which has been going on for some time, starting full throttle after the blockbuster success of The Sixth ...
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| Whiteout |
The story begins with a group of Cold War-era Russian soldiers fighting amongst themselves on a massive cargo plane carrying a top secret and obviously valuable (and perhaps lethal) load that ...
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| Wild at Heart [DVD] |
The two main characters are Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace (Laura Pace), young lovers on the run from Lula’s psychotic mama, Marietta, perversely played by Diane Ladd, Dern’s ...
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| Wild Hogs [DVD] |
However, credit must be given to director Walt Becker (National Lampoon's Van Wilder) and his casting agent for landing a diverse group of lead actors. From the straight comedy end of things ...
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| Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) [DVD] |
Like all of his films, Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) is a deeply personal work. It is of little surprise that Bergman used it as the starting place for his 1990 ...
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| Wild Things |
Director John McNaughton, who first came on the scene in 1989 when he stunned audiences with his ultra-low budget shocker "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," lets "Wild Things" be exactly what it ...
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| Wild Wild West |
Barry Sonnenfeld's "Wild Wild West" is a giant, bombastic flop of a movie.It's a $100-million science fiction-Western-comedy-action hybrid withelaborate special effects and big name stars that never ...
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| Willard |
First-time director Glen Morgan certainly had Tim Burton on the mind when making Willard, a darkly comedic remake of the 1971 cult classic about a social misfit who befriends an army of rats ...
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| William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream |
In saying, "Lord, what fools these mortals be," Puck (Stanley Tucci), theengagingly meddlesome sprite in "William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night'sDream," effectively summarizes that play's theme, as ...
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| William Shakespeare's 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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| Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) [DVD] |
The main characters in the film are two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), who have existed for eternity and spend their days silently and invisibly watching over the people of ...
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| Winter's Bone |
The story’s heroine is 17-year-old Ree Dolly, who is powerfully embodied in a career-making performance by Jennifer Lawrence. Unlike so many girls her age who have the luxury of worrying about ...
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| Wise Blood [DVD] |
Part of this may be a case of what works on page doesn’t always work as well on screen, particularly when grotesquerie is involved. It is somehow easier to become involved in the lives of strange, ...
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| Witchboard [DVD] |
The center of the story is a love triangle between a pretty young law student named Linda (Tawny Kitaen—yes, the girl from the Whitesnake videos) and her former boyfriend, Brandon (Stephen ...
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| Withnail and I [DVD] |
Bruce Robinson's Withnail and I is a doped-out comedy spun from autobiographical threads about two unemployed actors trying to make the best of times in London in late 1969. It features a ...
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| Witness [DVD] |
Witness is a film about balance, one that tries to find and laud the space between the extremes. It is a thriller, but it is also a love story about people who come from vastly different ...
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| Wizards [DVD] |
The story takes place two million years after the world was destroyed in a nuclear holocaust (in a bit of creepy prescience, the narration notes that the nuclear war was started by five terrorists ...
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| Woman in the Dunes (Suna no onna) [DVD] |
The story in Woman in the Dunes, which was written by novelist and frequent Teshigahara collaborator Kôbô Abe from his own novel, is stark and direct in eliciting metaphorical ...
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| Woman on Top |
Fina Torres' Woman on Top is an example of a quirky, potentially charming
romantic fantasy that simply tries too hard. Torres, working from an offbeat script by
first-time scribe Vera Blasi, ...
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| Wonder Boys [DVD] |
Wonder Boys is a film that desperately needs to let go. It takes place over one
weekend where anything that can go wrong does go wrong, but the whole film feels like it is
constantly holding ...
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| World Trade Center |
Much the same could be said about World Trade Center, Oliver Stones new film that is purportedly about the horrors of 9/11, but is really about two men who survived that harrowing day ...
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| WR: Mysteries of the Organism (WR: Misterije organizma) [DVD] |
In his groundbreaking tome Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel praises WR as “unquestionably one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s,” and he quotes ...
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| Written on the Wind [DVD] |
Written on the Wind is by far the most sordid of director Douglas
Sirk's 1950s social dramas. The debauched tale of an uberwealthy, but deeply
troubled Texas oil family, it reaches near ...
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