Endless Love

If you come away from Shana Feste’s Endless Love with nothing else, you’ll have seen two beautiful people with beautiful bodies in beautiful settings and, for a brief time at the beginning of the picture, some beautiful moments of falling into first love.   In…

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Labor Day

If you can get past the central premise—and that’s a big if—in Jason Reitman’s Labor Day, you’ll be rewarded with rich performances and an unabashed romanticism that, while perhaps unbelievable, also somehow works.  Set in 1987 on the outskirts of a Mayberry-esque hamlet, it’s…

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The Invisible Woman

The scandalous true story of a grand passion requited with bitter consequences, The Invisible Woman is an impeccably acted picture about the adulterous affair that destroyed Charles Dickens’ marriage, the reputation of his young mistress and galvanized 19th Century England society. Starring Felicity Jones…

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August: Osage County

On the Steppenwolf and Broadway stages, Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning August: Osage County, a portrait of family turmoil to end them all, was a galvanizing experience—a three-act, 3 ½ hour showdown between estranged family members gathering on the sweltering Oklahoma plains…

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

There’s a good movie somewhere in Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, but he hasn’t quite delivered it.  Based on James Thurber’s 1939 New Yorker short story and subsequent 1947 screen adaptation starring Danny Kaye, Stiller has taken a screenplay stuck in…

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The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are at the top of their respective games with The Wolf of Wall Street, the crown jewel of American film in 2013.  At 71, Scorsese returns to glorious form with a wild ride of a movie, an unrepentant and…

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American Hustle

A sensationally entertaining actors’ show—exactly what we expect from director David O. Russell—is the engine behind American Hustle, a smart piece of movie enjoyment so much fun to watch that it stands with Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street as a pair of…

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Inside Llewyn Davis

The beating heart of an artist in a tailspin fuels the Coen Brothers lovely little period picture, Inside Llewyn Davis, a beautifully rendered portrait of a struggling folk guitarist, played in a star-making performance by Oscar Isaac, circa 1961 Greenwich Village. In a season…

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Saving Mr. Banks

Emma Thompson gives a performance for the ages in Saving Mr. Banks, the new picture chronicling Walt Disney’s pursuit of humorless Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers, who in 1961 traveled from London to Hollywood to entertain signing away the film rights to her deeply…

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Philomena

You’d have to be a stone to be unaffected by Stephen Frears’ Philomena, the true story of sixty-something Irish woman who embarks on an unexpected odyssey to find the son taken from her by Catholic nuns some fifty years earlier. It’s a dramatic character…

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