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Taxi
Our country may be creativity bankrupt, corrupt and venal when it comes to filmmaking, and its filmmakers marked as victims and chumps (Keaton, Welles, von Stroheim and other case studies). Those who...
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The Forbidden Room
The climactic moment of the 1963 Jerry Lewis film Who’s Minding the Store? features a turbo-charged vacuum cleaner inflated to Hindenburg-like proportions after sucking up the merchandise of a...
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Entertainment
Gregg Turkington’s alter ego, Neil Hamburger – “America’s funnyman” – is a seedy, scowling phantom, sporting a cheap suit and a greasy comb-over, grasping multiple glasses of booze and coughing up...
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45 Years
Charlotte Rampling’s icy steel gaze, sizes you up, takes you in and spits you back out. As a young woman – a sleek model and an even sleeker actress – Rampling was a motion picture glossy and her film...
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Where To Invade Next
When the words “Michael Moore” are uttered to right wing Republican zealots, their eyes glaze over and they lapse into paroxysms of rage and retribution, the equivalent of the burlesque shtick of...
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The Hateful Eight
In Quentin Tarantino’s epic talkfest The Hateful Eight, Samuel L. Jackson encapsulates the ethos of the film: “Let’s slow it down. Let’s slow it way down.” In this three-hour plus road show exhibition...
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Maggie’s Plan
Woody Allen may have retreated to nostalgia but the Woody Allen films of the 1980s (Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Crimes and Misdemeanors) of self-absorbed intellectual New Yorkers stalking the...
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20th Century Women
James Stewart once told Peter Bogdanovich that films were “pieces of time.” Neither past, nor future, film is ever-present. In Mike Mills’s new film 20th Century Women, the scenes play like permanent...
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The Space Between Us
As Stan Laurel once declared in Sons of the Desert, “Life’s not short enough.” The Space Between Us is a Disney Channel heart-beater between teens masquerading as a science fiction epic, hitting all...
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Dying Laughing
In this new Trump era of a Dice Clay President and bully pulpit bull, standup comedy has more relevancy than ever, at least in terms of political discourse and people interested in a greater...
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After the Storm
At one point in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After the Storm a character remarks, “We’re having too many typhoons this year” and by that point in the film you know that the character is referring to more than a...
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The Death of Louis XIV
So far the best film of 2017 concerns the dying, rotting carcass of the French Sun King and the most suspenseful moment in the film is when the king manages to digest a cracker. Director and co-writer...
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