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Matthew Lickona 10:05 a.m., May 25
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FROM THE ARCHIVES
200 Cigarettes
Upwards of a dozen New Yorkers in destiny's dance on New Year's Eve, 1981. Flatly written comedy, and broadly acted in compensation. Wall-to-wall oldies. (It's an MTV Films co-production.) With Ben Affleck, Dave Chappelle, Janeane Garofalo, Kate Hudson, Courtney Love, ...
Target
It starts out, deceptively enough, in a comfily domestic mode, painting a relationship between middle-aged husband and wife that is warm but not without sudden passing chills, and a relationship between father and son that is cool but not openly ...
A Man for All Seasons
Heavy robes, stone palaces, esteemed actors, and melodious voices -- all in the service of some facile debates on the subject of justice and personal integrity. Paul Scofield is a too saintly Thomas More, Robert Shaw is a too noisy ...
The Housekeeper
Claude Berri's film has all the qualities you could want in a housekeeper if not all you could want in a film. Efficiency: the "exposition" is taken care of in the fully explored messy apartment during the opening credits. Attention ...
The Black Dahlia
James Ellroy's theory of the case -- the unsolved murder, disembowelment, and bisection of Hollywood wannabe Elizabeth Short in 1947 -- as expounded in 325 dense pages of fiction, fitted on screen into the film noir boilerplate: the laconic first-person ...
Magic Hunter
A thriller, of a sort, submerged unthrillingly in a swamp of history, Faustian mythology, religion, zoology. An undercover Hungarian cop, assigned to shadow an imperilled Russian chess master, is armed with seven magic bullets from the Devil, each of them ...
The Maltese Falcon
The third and the most revered (but, please, not the definitive) movie version of Hammett's mystery novel. It insists on the fun involved in private-eye escapades, as it wobbles underneath the consequences of some whimsical casting and playing — Sidney ...
Terri
Terri, played by newcomer Jacob Wysocki, is an overweight teenager who must endure the typical peer belligerence of adolescence. The high school scenes stir up some authenticity: the horniness, the misfits, the tenure-chasing teachers. John C. Reilly plays a well-meaning, ...
Mozart's Sister
Using members of his own family, director René Féret shows us the Mozart family as an exploited traveling act, gathering crumbs from the rich. He also seeks to elevate Wolfgang’s sister Nannerl (Marie Féret) as feminist martyr, her gifts quashed ...
The Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo's re-staging of the Algerian struggle for independence tries for a journalistic effect -- an historical epic in a newsreel idiom. But this effect really owes less to the grainy black-and-white image than to the selectivity of information, the ...
American Pie
would love to get the promo code for thiscyndie11 | 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Casa de Mi Padre
If you go expecting a Saturday Night Live type movie you will love it. If you go expecting a real movie you may be disappointed.K. Mennem | 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Melancholia
I find myself thinking about this movie sometimes when I look up at the sky. For better or worse, I guess it stuck with me.Reader_reader | 2 months, 1 week ago
My Week with Marilyn
From what I've seen in the ads, Michelle Williams just doesn't pull off this role for me. She isn't particularly sultry and sexy enough, and I strictly get a sense that she is acting. Now a young Lisa Marie Presley would have been hot in the role. In my opinion, ...Mindy Ross | 3 months, 4 weeks ago
There's an orangutan movie coming out that is associated with the work of Jane Goodall. Now that is something I'll go see. She's my hero--a woman very near and dear to my heart.
Mindy Ross | 4 months, 1 week ago