The Raid 2: Berandal (meaning thug), is quite an accomplished movie, and one that took me by complete surprise. If you saw 2012’s The Raid, the scrappy story of two Jakarta SWAT cops who took down a cabal of drug pushers holed up in…
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In today’s overly cautious culture of political correctness, it’s refreshing to have a subversive comedy of all-out annihilation. Bad Words, loaded with uproariously mean-spirited jokes in service of a genuinely creepy character (albeit one played by a likable movie star), takes no prisoners in its…
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Whatever the appeal of Veronica Mars may have been on the small screen, it is wholly lost on the big screen version of the same name, a lackluster movie that plays like a television show loaded with in-jokes, hijinks and cardboard characters, and a…
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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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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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You won’t find a better acting ensemble this year than the sprawling cast of August: Osage County, the new film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning play, about an extended—and highly dysfunctional—southern family reuniting on the Oklahoma plains after the patriarch’s death. This…
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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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It’s a good problem to have when your first cut of the top ten movies of the year comes in at about thirty. In 2013, the field was so dense and competition so intense, with one seemingly terrific film after another opening well…
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