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To Be and to Have (2002): A-
The most unvarnished cinematic portrait of childhood I’ve ever seen, Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and to Have (Être et avoir) documents with intimacy, grace and candor the daily goings-on at a one-room school in rural France. The school’s student body consists of a handful of older and younger children who are taught, in alternating shifts,…
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Shaolin Soccer (2001): A-
Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer takes a hackneyed sports story – down-and-out underdogs band together, learn the value of teamwork and sacrifice, and triumph – and turns it into a blitzkrieg of hilarious kung fu craziness. Shaolin disciple Sing (Chow) is desperate to find a way to promote his unique martial arts technique, and finds the…
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Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004): C+
Whereas 1995’s Ghost in the Shell artfully merged anime action with meditative philosophy, Mamoru Oshi’s 2004 sequel Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is one long, tedious rumination on the blurring distinction between man and machines. Years after Major Kusanagi disappeared into the digital ether, her former cyborg partner Bato – now teamed with detective…
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Ghost in the Shell (1995): B
Mamoru Oshi’s landmark Ghost in the Shell – which superbly melds two-dimensional artwork and computer graphics – has rightly been decried for helping usher in an age of convoluted, spectacle-driven science fiction. Simply blasting the film’s surface-over-substance storytelling, however, is to shortchange its intriguing (if frequently pretentious) investigation into the nature of reality. Major Kusanagi…
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Miss Congeniality (2000): C-
According to Miss Congeniality, there’s nothing quite as liberating as a beauty pageant. Skipping this dreadful Sandra Bullock vehicle, however, has got to place a close second. Donald Petrie’s makeover-by-numbers comedy follows a tomboy cop (Bullock’s Gracie Hart) as she goes undercover at the Miss United States competition to ferret out a killer. Gracie is…
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Predator 2 (1990): C+
Half as taut and twice as dumb, Predator 2 is also exponentially funnier – and therefore more fun – than its Schwarzenegger-headlined original. In downtown L.A., renegade cop Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is navigating a “war zone” in which drug gangs engage in armed conflict with the police, yet crazy Latino cokeheads and voodoo-practicing Jamaican…
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Akira (1988): B+
Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyber-punk anime classic Akira may be as muddled and ridiculous as it is exhilarating, but there’s no denying its still-astounding animation. Otomo, adapting his own 2,000+page manga, packs his convoluted film with too many extraneous side-stories involving anti-government protestors (angry about tax reform?), an army coup, and a romance between a rampaging superboy…
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The Five Obstructions (2003): B+
Those who find Danish auteur Lars Von Trier (Dancer in the Dark, Dogville) to be an insufferable, egomaniacal pain-in-the-ass will undoubtedly find much to loath about The Five Obstructions, a fascinating (and oft-times infuriating) documentary in which Von Trier instructs filmmaker Jorgen Leth to remake his abstract short film The Perfect Human (which Von Trier…
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Tokyo Godfathers (2003): B+
While neither as visually nor as thematically intricate as Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers – a reimagining of John Ford’s weepy Western 3 Godfathers in which three homeless friends attempt to return an abandoned baby to its parents on Christmas Eve – is nonetheless a delightfully rambunctious holiday fable about the vital importance of…
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Stander (2003): B-
“If you go fast enough, you can’t see where you’ve come from,” says a cohort of Andre Stander in Bronwen Hughes’ Stander, and it’s an outlook the notorious South African cop-turned-thief apparently held dear. Disgusted by his participation in the state-sanctioned murder of innocent blacks, Stander threw away a promising career in the police force…
