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Heat (1995): B+
Michael Mann’s beautifully hard-edged direction – not unlike a sports car that masks its brawn underneath a beautifully elegant exterior – was never more muscular or sleek than with Heat, his near-masterpiece about the cat-and-mouse competition between ruthless thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) and cagey lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Mann strives for epic…
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Because of Winn Dixie
(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn) In a marketplace dominated by flashy, hyperactive, bathroom humor-centric extravaganzas like Shrek 2 and Shark Tale, it’s refreshing to find, in Wayne Wang’s Because of Winn Dixie, a children’s film that embraces storytelling modesty and a balanced view of the world as both depressing and joyous. Told with a…
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Millennium Actress (2001): A
The finest anime film I’ve ever seen, Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress concerns a documentary filmmaker’s interview with legendary Japanese film actress Chiyoko Fujiwara, who retired from the business 30 years earlier to live a hermetic life in her forest-shrouded home. The life story Chiyoko recounts is one which melds authentic memories with both her movies…
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Along Came Polly (2004): D+
Ben Stiller headlined six films last year (Duplex, Starsky & Hutch, Envy, Dodgeball, Meet the Fockers), and Along Came Polly may be the worst. Inane, inorganic and predictable from the start, the film exists solely as a reason for the clumsy comedian to behave ineptly while simultaneously giving Jennifer Aniston some post-Friends big-screen exposure. Ruben…
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Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (2003): B+
Korean provocateur Kim Ki-Duk sets aside his penchant for misogyny and violence with Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, and the results are somber, serene and stirring. Split into the title’s five seasons, the film is a simple fable about the different stages of a young man’s slow but steady maturation. A boy lives on a…
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Tupac: Resurrection (2003): C
Tupac: Resurrection provides an “autobiographical” take on the late gangsta rapper’s tumultuous life, yet those who don’t believe in the holiness of Tupac – this reviewer being one of them – will find the documentary’s gushing adoration for its subject annoyingly one-sided and misleading. Lauren Lazin’s film charts the rapper’s rise to stardom with montages…
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The Isle (2000): B-
Before 2003’s heralded Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, Korean director Kim Ki-Duk was best known for his unnerving shock-cinema love story The Isle, a creepy, gruesome, gorgeous and flabbergasting treatise on romantic obsession and violent, nasty male-female relationships. Hee-Jin (Suh Jung) is the mute proprietor of fishing shacks sitting out in a river who spends…
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Hotel Rwanda (2004): C
It’s difficult, simply because of its subject matter, to be totally unmoved by Hotel Rwanda, the based-on-real-events account of Paul Rusesabagaina (Don Cheadle), the manger of a posh African luxury hotel who heroically sheltered Tutsis during the 1994 genocide orchestrated by the majority Hutu population. Yet more often than not, Terry George’s film proves itself…
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Polyester (1981): B
While it might be a tad simplistic to state that every John Waters film is, at heart, exactly the same, Polyester certainly shares fundamental similarities to many of the director’s prior and subsequent offerings. Waters’ 1981 freak-a-thon was “filmed in Oderama,” meaning that, during its initial theatrical release, moviegoers were provided scratch-and-sniff cards to use…
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The Flight of the Phoenix (1965): B+
Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix concerns a plane populated by oil company employees and military men that, due to a monstrous sand storm, crash lands in the Saharan desert. Forced to cope with the dawning realization that no rescue party is forthcoming and their water supply is depleting, the men – led by…
