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Jul 8, 1985
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Neo-neorealism from the Taviani brothers, who emerged from the obscurity of Italian television to take the grand prize at Cannes with this 1977 study of a boy growing up under the geographical and familial oppression of Sardinia.
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Oct 26, 1985
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Teinosuke Kinugasa's mind-boggling silent masterpiece of 1926 was thought to have been lost for 40 years until the director discovered a print in his garden shed.
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- by Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Tags: Drama
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Apr 28, 2020
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After making several short films about young people in the titular Florida Everglades community—Pahokee, a town with only 6,000 residents and a median income of $14,000—filmmaking duo Patrick Bresnan and Ivete Lucas extend their scope with this feature-length documentary about a year in the lives of four of the town’s Black and Latinx high school seniors.
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Oct 26, 1985
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Film scholar Jane Feuer has argued that the Hollywood musical is a politically conservative genre, a notion challenged by the Warners musicals of the 30s, Bells Are Ringing (1969), and this exuberant, underrated 1957 movie.
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Nov 7, 2003
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"What was so wrong about killing one of these stupid animals?" ponders Ryo Ikebe in voice-over as director Masahiro Shinoda pans across a crowded city street in black-and-white 'Scope, setting the malignant tone of this fine Japanese noir (1962).
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- by J.R. Jones
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Tags: Drama
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Aug 18, 2006
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This first-person documentary about the effects of the security wall Israel's building across occupied Palestine in defiance of the International Court of Justice is an affecting cri de coeur, though director Nida Sinnokrot takes sides—we don't hear about any Palestinian terrorism.
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May 11, 2007
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These decades-old shorts offer affecting cris de coeur about refugee life; their technical rough edges contribute to their feeling of raw authenticity, of fugitive images snatched between explosions.
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Apr 29, 2005
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No comic filmmaker in America works as hard as Todd Solondz to ride the knife's edge between humor and pathos: his characters are lonely, unhappy, and helplessly cruel to one another, but intimate encounters between them often crash past the barriers of misery into hilarity.
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Oct 26, 1985
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Rudy Vallee turns in his best performance as a gentle, puny millionaire named Hackensacker in this brilliant, simultaneously tender and scalding 1942 screwball comedy by Preston Sturges—one of the real gems in Sturges's hyperproductive period at Paramount.
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- by Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Tags: Comedy
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Jul 7, 2020
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This Sundance darling gained plenty of attention when it was bought for $22 million—far and away the biggest Sundance deal of all time.
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Jan 18, 1985
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G.W. Pabst's 1928 portrayal of eroticism and despair, a seductive and craftily constructed vehicle.
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Oct 26, 1985
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This best and most neglected of Elia Kazan's early features (1950) is an expert and taut thriller about a public health doctor (Richard Widmark) trying to find a gang of thieves, one of whom may be infected with bubonic plague.
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Mar 7, 1986
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French director Julien Duvivier (Pepe le Moko) spent the World War II years as an exile in Hollywood, then returned home to direct this crackerjack mystery (1946), which probes at some of his countrymen's worst instincts.
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- by J.R. Jones
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Tags: Drama
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May 13, 2005
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This 2004 assemblage of excerpts from industrial, educational, advertising, and amateur films, collected by archivist Rick Prelinger over two decades, presents a portrait of 20th-century America, from strikes to elections to civil defense.
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Dec 29, 2006
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A Mexican-Spanish coproduction (2006) by the talented Guillermo del Toro (Cronos), this nightmarish fairy tale for grown-ups takes place in Spain after the civil war, when the Republicans were still counting on help from the Allies that would never come.
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