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 | Kinko's After Hours André is a nice young man whose meaningless job is to operate the photocopier at the local stationery store in a working-class neighborhood in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil. A high-school dropout, he spends his days reading fragments of poems, plays, essays, and novels as they pass over the copier's rhythmic light. These assorted fragments teach André a little about everything but not a lot about any one thing.More |  | Akin to Vogon Poetry The creative minds behind this cinematic undertaking have their hearts in the right place and hired the right visual artists to make a go of it. The major film adaptation of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" does an admirable job of conveying, as the "Hitchhiker" book puts it, just how "vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big" the universe actually is --- and has enough tongue-in-cheek to mimic the chuckle-inducing elements of Adams's writing, which borders on astute social commentary, even if it dumbs down the actual language.More |  | Manna from Baseball Heaven I hate baseball. Baseball is boring. I could care less whether the Giants or the Dodgers win. So the fact that anyone can make baseball even remotely interesting to me is saying something in my playbook. Michael Wranovics' "Up for Grabs" is an illuminating study of how greed for greenbacks made a laughingstock of two grownups who took to court a matter that should have been resolved amicably over a couple of beers.More |  | Cinema Paradiso Set in the innovative and architecturally fascinating Museum of Cinema in Turin, Italy, Davide Ferrario's About 'Midnight ('Dopo mezzanotte') is a simple, age-old romance for people who love old films. One evening Martino (Giorgio Pasotti) rescues Amanda (Francesca Inaudi) from the police and keeps her safe within the palatial confines of the museum where he works as a night watchman. He loves to project random movie reels from the museum's vault onto the large screen in the cinema, and now he has a visitor to convert to the appeal of cinema's magical possibilities.More |  | Defeat of the Will Oliver Hirschbiegel's 'Downfall' ("Der Untergang") is an intriguing portrait of Adolf Hitler and his closest advisors during the last days of the Third Reich as Berlin fell to the Allies, bringing World War II to an end in Europe.More |  | You Can Never Leave Natural disasters that destroy villages and decimate populations easily bring out the world's empathy. People travel to aid victims and money pours in from all over the world to help with relief efforts. When it comes to genocide, however, humanitarian intervention becomes considerably harder to count on.More |  | The Best Films
1. Fahrenheit 9/11
Politics aside, the fact that this uneven documentary drew multiplex crowds in record numbers proves that Michael Moore's film struck a nerve. Unfortunately, President Bush gave voters enough novocaine to ward off the pain.More |  | More Than a Song-and-Dance Man When Kevin Spacey performed at Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco while on a recent publicity tour for 'Beyond the Sea', all reports indicated that he channeled Bobby Darin to the core. Spacey inhabits Darin onscreen too, although the film's script shows signs of having been passed through countless rewrites and one too many writers, including Spacey himself. Stylistically the film is all over the map.More |  | The Bostonian Tinies Although not quite as creative as J.K. Rowling, macabre as Charles Addams, or unsettling as Gorey, San Francisco writer Daniel Handler has achieved considerable success with his series of (13 planned) novelettes for children about three orphaned youngsters -- you could call them "The Bostonian Tinies" -- who continually fall into the evil clutches of their nemesis uncle, Count Olaf.More |  | Lots of Sex-Talk Bill Condon's Kinsey is three stories in one. It's about the life of Alfred Kinsey, the world-famous sex researcher; it's about his work that stirred a nation sixty years ago; and it's about America's fitful sexual awakening two decades before the official onset of the sexual revolution.More |
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