A tribute to the World War II merchant marine (1943) with Humphrey Bogart and Raymond Massey as officers and Alan Hale and Sam Levene as seamen.
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This is more or less Fatal Beauty in drag in a Detroit setting—with Carl Weathers (Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies) taking the place of Whoopi Goldberg.
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This 1993 film by the eclectic and talented Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (The Peddler, Marriage of the Blessed) is a contemporary semitragic farce about a burly film actor who wants to act only in art films but is forced by his family's economic demands to do a string of trashy commercial movies.
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Kon Ichikawa's 1963 masterpiece, one of the most dazzling and stylistically audacious Japanese films ever made, has to be seen to be believed—though in Japan, interestingly enough, it's never been regarded as anything but a potboiler.
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Five winsome African-American women pursue Hollywood acting careers in this 89-minute documentary by Daniel Yost (cowriter of Drugstore Cowboy).
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A 1988 East German feature by Siegfried Kuhn, in which a well-known actress in Nazi Germany (Corinna Harfouch) blurs the usual dividing line between art and life, transforming herself from an “Aryan” into a Jew to live with a Jewish man she loves and eventually auditioning for a Jewish theater company.
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Stanley Kwan's 1991 masterpiece (also known as Ruan Ling-yu and Center Stage) is still the greatest Hong Kong film I've seen, though shortening the original running time of 146 minutes by around half an hour has been harmful.
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Apart from its obtrusively kitschy music, this 1996 Catalan feature by Ventura Pons is seriously done: preparing for an audition, a young drama student interviews three veteran actresses—an international diva, a TV star, and a dubbing director.
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