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Feb 16, 2012
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I wasn't as impressed as some of my colleagues by Oren Moverman's directing debut, The Messenger (2009), though Woody Harrelson was terrific as a steely marine who must drive around notifying military families that their loved ones are dead.
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May 16, 2009
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Akira Kurosawa's 1951 film won the grand prize at the Venice film festival, introducing Kurosawa (and through him the Japanese film) to most of the Western world.
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- by Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Tags: Drama
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May 24, 2012
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Brad Bird's second collaboration with Pixar (2007) is more ambitious and meditative than his Oscar-winning The Incredibles.
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Apr 26, 2012
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Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, so turning him into the heroic sleuth of a mystery thriller makes perfect sense, and the much-debated circumstances of his death in October 1849 provide an ideal jumping-off point for this macabre entertainment.
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Mar 28, 2013
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Matteo Garrone follows his crime epic Gomorrah (2008) with a comedy about reality TV, and though it hardly rivals the earlier movie in its social complexity, it still offers the spectacle of a vibrant and vividly realized Neapolitan neighborhood.
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- by J.R. Jones
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Tags: Drama
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Dec 21, 2011
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The most densely allegorical of Alfred Hitchcock's masterpieces (1954), moving from psychology to morality to formal concerns and finally to the theological.
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Dec 21, 2011
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There are too many conflicting levels of authorship—between Alfred Hitchcock, Daphne du Maurier, and David O. Selznick—for this 1940 film to be a complete success, but through its first two-thirds it is as perfect a myth of adolescence as any of the Disney films, documenting the childlike, nameless heroine's initiation into the adult mysteries of sex, death, and identity, and the impossibility of reconciling these forces with family strictures.
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Nov 22, 2007
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Most family films nowadays operate on two distinct levels, one for children and another for jaded adults, but these classic shorts by French director Albert Lamorisse are so pure in their emotion and elemental in their drama that parents may be as moved as their kids.
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Oct 8, 2009
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Released in China as two movies but edited down to a single feature for U.S. release, John Woo's 2008 historical drama takes place early in the third century, when the Han Dynasty, having won a civil war in the north, set out to crush two troublemaking warlords in the south.
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Oct 26, 1985
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Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's Trilby-based ballet film (1948) has been the cult property of dance freaks for far too long.
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Oct 26, 1985
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Along with James Whale's The Great Garrick, this 1949 melodrama about the French Revolution, also known as The Black Book, is one of the few period pictures that qualify as film noir; Anthony Mann directed it with sumptuously arty chiaroscuro (cinematography by John Alton).
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May 2, 2013
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Mira Nair is so effective and important as a chronicler of the South Asian experience in America (Mississippi Masala, The Namesake) that one hates to see her wasting her time on stuff like Vanity Fair and Amelia.
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- by J.R. Jones
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Tags: Drama
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Mar 8, 2011
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Alex Cox's 1984 punk comedy is set in a rotting Los Angeles, where a disaffected adolescent (Emilio Estevez) finds an outlet for his aggression and an answer to his boredom in an apprenticeship with a professional car repossessor (Harry Dean Stanton).
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Jul 13, 2007
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Released by MGM, starring two busy Hollywood actors, and easily slotted as a Vietnam POW adventure, this 2009 drama could be Werner Herzog's most commercial movie ever.
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- by J.R. Jones
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Tags: Drama
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Jul 1, 2010
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Since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, 42 American soldiers have been killed in the desolate Korangal Valley, which serves as a relay point for Taliban forces traveling between Kabul and the Pakistan border.
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