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Midnight in Paris (2011): B
Love ignites the City of Lights’ magic in Midnight in Paris, the first Woody Allen film in forever to not wholly grate on the nerves. That status isn’t immediately apparent, however, as Allen’s latest opens with a beautiful if unimaginative day-to-night travelogue montage of Paris’ most famous sights (the Eiffel Tower! The Louvre! The Arc…
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The Thin Red Line (1998): A
Over every grassy hilltop and around a jungle stream’s every bend, The Thin Red Line poses open-ended questions: Is there goodness and truth? Are we noble or savage? Do love and hate define us equally? Are those qualities bestowed upon us by a higher power, or are they our inheritance from our animal ancestors? Can…
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Badlands (1973): A
Awash in reveries of outlaw fame, tabloid romance, and futures that either never could or would be, Badlands exists in a hypnotic dream-state of young love and murder. When garbage man Kit (Martin Sheen) meets teenage baton-twirler Holly (Sissy Spacek), it’s an instantaneous marriage of likeminded deluded souls. With Kit driven by psychopathic notions of…
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Thor (2011): C+
Marvel second-stringer Thor gets his own summer-blockbuster vehicle with the unimaginatively titled Thor (what, he couldn’t even get a preceding “The Mighty”?), a merely adequate introductory saga coated in hammy regality by director Kenneth Branagh. Visualizing the god-realm of Asgard as a metropolis of golden-glittering towers, spires and rainbow bridges – the last of these…
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Saint (2010): B-
A slasher-film homage that reimagines Santa Claus as an undead demon, Saint accurately rehashes genre conventions, even if it chooses not to be the least bit scary. Going for more grind-and-gristle than the superficially similar, more fantasy-oriented Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, and working from the Dutch conception of the jolly old soul, Maas’ film…
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Neon Flesh (2010): D
On the basis of Neon Flesh, writer/director Paco Cabezas really loves Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, except he wishes it had done more to celebrate misogynistic immorality. Ricky (Mario Casas) decides that, to please the hooker mother (Macarena Gómez) who abandoned him on the streets at twelve and who’s now getting out of prison,…
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Underwater Love (2011): B+
A Japanese “pink film” (i.e. soft-core porn) that’s also a giddy musical set to the absurdist tunes of French-German pop duo Stereo Total, Underwater Love concerns the difficulties that arise for factory worker Asuka (Sawa Masaki) after she meets a kappa – a mythological human-fish creature that has a beak, a turtle shell on its…
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Fight Club (1999): A-
Fight Club ostensibly celebrates the very things it eventually decries, though that’s in keeping with its fundamental schizophrenia. David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic isn’t a simple A-B construct – its cinematic (and, thus, mass-market) glorification of its characters’ bruised-knuckle anti-materialism may be contradictory, but Jim Uhls’ script (based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel) is at heart…
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The Adjustment Bureau (2011): C
The battle between divine determinism and free will takes mundane form in The Adjustment Bureau, the story (loosely inspired by a Philip K. Dick tale) of a hotshot young politician named David (Matt Damon) who, after meeting the apparent girl of his dreams in ballerina Elise (Emily Blunt), unwittingly walks in on a group of…
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Women in Trouble (2009): D
A female-centric bit of Tarantino/Almodovar-ish nonsense, Women in Trouble offers a cornucopia of chatty intertwined tales concerning women whose common links are both their need to tell special someones how they really feel, and to engage in long conversations while dressed in bras and panties. Writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez’s story is structurally clichéd – what with…
