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Precious: Based on the Novel Push By Sapphire (2009): C
An exploitative social drama dressed up in Oscar-baiting inner-city threads, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire mucks around in low-income-housing misery, abuse and degradation in search not of enlightenment but merely liberal-guilt shock. In 1987, obese Precious (Gabby Sidibe) is 16 and still in junior high school, pregnant with her second baby by…
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Law Abiding Citizen (2009): C+
A titular hyphen isn’t the only thing missing from Law Abiding Citizen – logic is also in woefully short supply. One of the year’s most willfully inane Hollywood blockbusters, F. Gary Gray’s tale is basically a legal-themed variation on Saw. The story revolves around a seemingly average husband and father named Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler)…
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The Boondock Saints (1999): C-
Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints was, as history tells it, enthusiastically acquired by Miramax and then, once push came to shove over production disagreements, dropped like a stone. It was a deserved fate, considering that this dim-witted, aesthetically clunky Tarantino clone prizes glib violence, rank misogyny and even-ranker homophobia in the service of “edginess.” In…
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Happiness (1998): B+
Todd Solondz’s Happiness was greeted with controversy upon its 1998 release thanks to its empathetic portrait of a suburban husband and father of three who has a deviant taste for young boys. Detached from the hubbub, however, it’s harder to discern the actual objection to Solondz’s approach to this, the most incendiary of his sophomore…
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Where the Wild Things Are (2009): B+
Loneliness, anger and fear are primal emotions that, in the hearts of children, can swell and consume with great tumult, a fact that Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are taps into with tenderness and respect. In adapting Maurice Sendak’s beloved 1963 children’s book for the screen, Jonze adds much – an unavoidable result of…
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Antichrist (2009): C
Aiming to incite shock and outrage with Antichrist, Lars von Trier instead merely produces numbing indifference. Working from a template that strongly recalls that of Don’t Look Know, the Danish filmmaker’s latest begins with an overwrought intro – shot in look-at-me slow-motion and black-and-white, and scored to classical music – in which a husband (Willem…
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Surrogates (2009): C
Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates gets little right. Its first crucial misstep is an inability to properly set up its own fiction, positing a world in which people now interact with each other and society via robotic avatars known as Surrogates, but failing to ever explain why such a radical development would be welcomed by humanity at…
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Wild Grass (2009): C
Everyone dies at the end of Wild Grass, mercifully. But before the four protagonists’ private plane takes a fatal nosedive, 87-year-old Alain Resnais’ latest has long since gone down in flames, partaking in meta gestures and random flights of fancy with a reckless abandon unjustified by its perplexing, off-putting tale. When 63-year-old Georges (André Dussollier)…
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Flanders (2006): C-
Like his counterpart Michael Haneke, Bruno Dumont’s oeuvre consists of one film made over and over again. And though its wartime setting seems apt for the L’Humanite director’s belief in man’s bestial nature, Flanders nonetheless proves his most trying regurgitation to date. Another tale of Neanderthal simpletons screwing, killing and staring off into the remote…
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L’Humanité (1999): C
Bruno Dumont’s controversial Cannes Grand Prix winner L’Humanité attempts spiritual inquiry with a rigorousness that’s lacking from its actual police-procedural plot. In a gray, underpopulated northern seaside French town, detective Pharaon (Emmanuel Schotté) runs madly through the countryside and lands face down in the mud, from which director Dumont cuts away to a shot of…
