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Movies
Poignant, Heartbreaking Docudrama
Directed by Michael Winterbottom (Tristram Shandy, The Road to Guantanamo, 9 Songs) and adapted by John Orloff, A Mighty Heart methodically chronicles the desperate, eventually futile, search for Daniel Pearl, an investigative journalist for the Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped by a militant group in Karachi, Pakistan on January 23, 2002. On February 1st, the militants executed Pearl, his death videotaped and distributed to Pakistani and American officials more than a week later. More
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Movies
Riding in Cars with Boys
I think I can safely say that mothers are, at least once in their lives, taken for granted. We assume that they must be completely devoted to their children; that their kids must be the apple of their eye and the center of their universe. Director Penny Marshall's latest film, Riding in Cars with Boys, is a nuanced, funny and bittersweet look at real, unadulterated motherhood. More
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Movies
The Long Way Home
Director Robert Altman has such a distinctive style that it would be easy to spot his work without even his name in the credits. His best films are richly textured panoramas, bittersweet tales driven by strong ensemble casts and sharp dialogue. His camera floats constantly from one player to the next, hesitating just long enough to capture some telling look or remark before moving on to its next target. More often than not, he focuses on those brief, sometimes mundane interactions, preferring to explore the unfolding relationships between his characters than to keep his narrative moving. More
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Movies
Trippy Mind Bender to Nowhere
If dialogue-driven, intellectual game playing centered on paranoid, slacker-type drug addicts, and undercover narcs in a (slightly) futuristic world leaves you cold, then Richard Linklater's (Before Sunset, School of Rock, Waking Life), adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1977 novel, A Scanner Darkly, won’t be for you. To be fair, the film wasn’t meant for most moviegoers, but you probably knew that already. More
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Movies
A Documentary about Author Ayn Rand
A Sense of Life, Michael Paxton's new documentary about author Ayn Rand, probably draws quite an interesting crowd to its Opera Plaza screenings. On the one side are Rand enthusiasts, die-hard Objectivists eager to pay homage to the matriarch of their movement. On the other side are people, like me, who have a morbid fascination with a controversial philosophy, one that’s been alternately embraced and scorned for decades by academics, politicians and society at large. More
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Movies
Another Coen Brothers Masterpiece
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars.
Less a laugh-inducing absurdist farce than a head-scratching existential black comedy, A Serious Man belongs in the same category as the Coen Brothers better (or even best) films. More
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Movies
Slipping right through the cracks
In this quiet movie based on a novel by the same name written by Anne Tyler, a woman carves the name of a man into her forehead with a piece of broken glass. In any other film, this would be an act driven by a macabre mental sickness but here it's seen as just funny, a quirk rather than a psychosis. More
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Movies
Uninspired Sci-Fi /Action Storyline
Based on a short story written in 1952 by science fiction writer/fantasist Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Martian Chronicles), A Sound of Thunder marks the return of Peter Hyams (Timecop, The Relic) to the science fiction genre. Viewers familiar with his work will look at his return with skepticism, doubt and, maybe, a smile or two. Alas, even low expectations remain unmet by the time A Sound of Thunder fades to black and the end credits mercifully roll. More
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Movies
True love never dies
In A Very Long Engagement, visionary French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet seduces and bombards viewers with a poetic arsenal of mournful, dreamlike imagery that rivals, if not exceeds, the imagination of Tim Burton and the craftsmanship of Francis Ford Coppola, yet ultimately fails to communicate fully the love, pain, and suffering of its heroine, which are trammeled by the film's rich visual tapestry and lack of traditional plot, character, and theme development. More
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Movies
return of the mack
Author Nick Hornby has cornered the market on writing about despicable yet likable white guys. Immature, self-absorbed men with major emotional problems like the inability to communicate with anyone else but themselves. Hand them a sign that says "The End is Near" and they could instantly turn into your average neighborhood weirdo. But Hornby's too smart for that and so are the characters he creates. In About A Boy, you are introduced to the paradisial life of Will Freeman (Hugh Grant). More
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