Three decades ago I spent many a late evening with Sybil Danning—the arresting Austrian model turned American movie star, she of the hourglass physique, disarming screen presence and tongue-meet-cheek relationship with her often outrageously entertaining movies—at the small-town Michigan drive-in where I was schooled…
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If ambition and scale were the sole criteria for judging movies, Cloud Atlas would be a towering achievement. But this sometimes daring movie, based on David Mitchell’s sprawling novel about the interconnectedness of humanity and lives that reverberate across centuries, is at best a…
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In The Sessions, John Hawkes is real-life poet Mark O’Brien, paralyzed from the neck down after a childhood polio affliction and relegated to an iron lung. At age 38, O’Brien decided it was time to lose his virginity and hired a sex surrogate, played…
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Tyler Perry is woefully miscast as James Patterson’s star detective in Rob Cohen’s mean-spirited Alex Cross, featuring a wildly possessed performance by Matthew Fox as a subhuman killer whose “true calling” is pain—a bounty which he inflicts upon viewers of this movie. Perry, an…
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Ben Affleck’s Argo so expertly balances its seemingly disparate story elements—the political history, the high-flying Hollywood satire, the great escape, the father seeking redemption—it signals a marked directorial growth from Affleck in one of the year’s best movies. Moving away from the Boston setting…
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The first time I met Joseph Gordon-Levitt was for a picture called Manic, about a young man in crisis, over his head with anger issues. I still recall the marked intensity of the then nineteen-year-old, clad in skinny corduroys and a CBGB tee, and…
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of the most sensitive movies ever made about teenagers. At a time in American movies where teens are vapid aliens who speak/text in too-cool poseur dialogue de rigueur, Hollywood has reached its nadir in depicting the…
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Pitch Perfect almost is just that, a roaring comedy about dueling collegiate a capella teams featuring more laughs than just about any comedy this year, and that’s saying something in a year that’s brought us such offbeat gems as Safety Not Guaranteed and Ruby…
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