San Diego Reader

Holy Smoke 3.0 stars

The point of departure is truly inspired: a young Australian woman's religious conversion while on holiday in India, and the scandalized reactions of her middle-class suburban family back home, the most severe of which is to enlist the help of ...

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The Jacket 1.0 stars

Time-travel contrivance, at least as convoluted as it is clever: a Gulf War vet, subjected to crackpot experiments in a mental hospital, bodily visits the future, accidentally bumps into a big girl whom he had once bumped into as a ...

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Léolo 0.0 stars

A foreign film to alienate practically everyone. It concerns a French-Canadian lad of twelve who's convinced that his real father is not the sluglike drudge at the head of the household, obsessed with bowel movements and "regularity," but rather an ...

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The Immortal Bachelor 0.0 stars

A cast of abundant charm and talent, whether or not one agrees to count Giancarlo Giannini, can do little with this dim romantic comedy in which a slap in the face acts as an infallible aphrodisiac, and goodness in bed ...

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Shag 1.0 stars

Advertised, not very instructively, as Shag: The Movie, when what we needed to know was Shag: The Dance, in case we thought it might have been Shag: The Carpet or Shag: The Haircut. It concerns four girlfriends on a bachelorette ...

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Erased None stars

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The Return of the Pink Panther 3.0 stars

As a first principle of comedy, Blake Edwards suggests there is no surer guarantee of laughter than the audience's confident expectation to laugh. This predisposition is primed, in this case, by Edwards's two earlier Inspector Clouseau farces and by his ...

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Potiche 3.0 stars

Director François Ozon’s love letter to the post-menopausal woman: wise, matriarchal, and unencumbered by desire. What opens as a seemingly breezy domestic farce set in late-’70s France quickly ventures into the-personal-is-political territory as an aging trophy wife is forced to ...

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Death Becomes Her 1.0 stars

Elixir-of-life fantasy about the rivalry between an aging actress and best-selling dietician. There's something Twilight Zone-y about the blend of black comedy and Sunday sermon, as well as about the anecdotal narrative. There is nothing Twilight Zone-y about the Silly ...

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Pale Rider 1.0 stars

Clint Eastwood has been able to pick up the Western genre right where he left it, nine years earlier with The Outlaw Josey Wales. Where he left it, though, was on its sickbed, and what comes entirely natural to Clint ...

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