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9 hrs ago - Lest there be anyone laboring under the delusion that the abuse of detainees at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — and, later, at the Guantánamo Bay detention center and Abu Ghraib — was the work of “a few bad apples,” “Taxi to the Dark Side” cites a wealth of damning evidence to the contrary.
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9 hrs ago - Regardless of whether you can truly go home again, movies such as “Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins” suggest that you can, and they serve up hearty doses of original kin to comically substantiate that notion. Unfortunately, raunch eclipses deeper zest in this family-reunion romp. And the results aren’t funny enough.
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7 days ago - Robbed of her sight by a childhood accident, Sydney (Jessica Alba) receives an unexpected boon in the form of a corneal transplant, opening her eyes to a world once shrouded in darkness. She wakes from surgery with a sunny smile and a jolt of optimism, in a scene of such pronounced serenity that one can’t help but sense the undercurrent of disaster. And sure enough, there’s a catch — Sydney’s vision extends beyond the mortal realm, and all around her lurk wandering spirits and the fearsome reapers who usher them into the shadows.
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7 days ago - A possessive ghost outrageously disrupts the life of her ex-fiance’s new girlfriend in “Over Her Dead Body,” a comedy that, like the recent “P.S. I Love You,” should constitute grounds for a moratorium on the use of spousal phantoms as dramatic devices. The occasional spark generated by the romantic leads keeps things watchable, but barely. The predominant formulaic hokum limits the charm.
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8 days ago - Nadine Labaki: perhaps not a familiar name, not yet. You are certain to hear more of her, well beyond this report about her first film, “Caramel.”
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14 days ago - It’s easy to forget that the story of John Rambo began 36 years ago with a novel by Canadian author David Morrell, whose distaste for the Vietnam War fueled his vision of a shell-shocked veteran on a murderous rampage in the Kentucky backwoods. Morrell painted Rambo as a merciless killer whose harrowing tours of duty had left him despairing and emotionally comatose. He was a menace, a savage unleashed on a hostile society, and in the end he took his own life.
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15 days ago - “How She Move” is a girl-meets-stomp story that dazzles as a dance showcase, stumbles as an urban melodrama, and serves up enough agreeably natural current among its dynamic young protagonists to emerge above the middling mark.
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15 days ago - If you’re a guy you won’t totally get it. But if you just “get” that you don’t totally get it, you got it. And that should be enough to deliver a devastating blow to the solar plexus.
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21 days ago - “Cloverfield,” which takes its name from the Santa Monica boulevard where producer J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot production company is based, is a sleek, silly product of green filmmaking: It recycles old ideas and molds them into a lean, briskly paced thriller that owes as much to classic monster movies like “Godzilla” as ambitious, gimmick-driven misfires like “The Blair Witch Project.”
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28 days ago - The comedy “First Sunday” sports a complex and gritty undertone. Nonetheless, much of the poverty and desperation—the serious thread that feeds the hilarity—will be missed by many.
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28 days ago - “The Bucket List” begins with a bleak, unsparing glimpse into the unraveling lives of two terminal-cancer patients and ends in unblushing sentimentality. Along the way, the unlikely pair, thrust into close quarters at a Los Angeles hospital, overcome their differences in style and temperament to become best friends and partners in an enterprise that bears all the markings of a shameless plot device.
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28 days ago - “Persepolis” is a coming-of-age tale, an Iranian-condition drama, a female-condition journey and a universally relevant salute to free expression, all presented as a 95-minute hand-drawn cartoon. As animation goes, its simple, black-and-white imagery achieves glory. As a story about family, revolution, roots, integrity and a young girl’s rocky but inspiring evolution, it’s a sparkling blend of poetry, tragedy, humor and humanism.
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35 days ago - “There Will Be Blood” is a capital-“A” art film concerned with weighty subjects and front-loaded with a big performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as fictitious oil man Daniel Plainview, who scratches out a fortune in early 20th-century Southern California by digging holes in the ground, striking it rich, and bullying anyone who gets in his way.
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36 days ago - Self-defeatingly plethoric but still invaluable, the Iraq documentary currently takes the form of “Meeting Resistance,” a small but significant portrait of Iraq’s insurgency. The accounts it provides — from resistance members themselves — of who the insurgents are and why they are waging a violent struggle against the U.S. occupation contrast compellingly with the scenario presented on our own shores. The film is a worthy addition to the growing collection of cinema that the Iraq morass has spawned.
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37 days ago - The only conclusion to be drawn from “The Killing of John Lennon,” a fictional re-creation of the title event, is that murderer Mark David Chapman (Jonas Ball) was a mentally unstable nobody who wanted to become a somebody; a goal that by ingenuity or luck (perhaps a bit of both) he accomplished.
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43 days ago - “The Orphanage” is executive-produced by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, creator of “Pan’s Labyrinth,” so right from the beginning we expect something fantastic — as in fanciful, unreal and perhaps genuinely, deeply disturbing.
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45 days ago - This story about a young boy, who raises a sea monster from when it hatches until the all-too-short time when it has reaches the fearsome size of a dragon, has the earmarks of an “E.T.” story.
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45 days ago - In a pivotal moment, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) turns away from his only child, H.W. (Dillon Freasier), emotionally abandoning the boy, who deafened by an accident at his father’s oilrig, has now become a burden.
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49 days ago - A grief-shattered widow learns to embrace life again, thanks to a series of tasks delineated by her late husband in letters he wrote while dying, in “P.S. I Love You,” a romantic dramedy that proves as hackneyed as that setup suggests. The gimmick eclipses the human ingredient here, and there isn’t enough charm or credibility in this movie to allow you to believe.
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49 days ago - Politics get done, undone, and not done by a process very different than what we imagine. That’s the unambiguous message of "Charlie Wilson’s War," delivered by a brilliantly couched folly that camouflages the grave nature of its end game, enabling us to laugh at what should have us in shock.
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49 days ago - “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” is a piece of sophisticated trash—a skillful, well produced comedy that employs racial stereotypes, casual sex, and anatomical display (reconfirming the unsightly nature of male genitalia), all in the service of the story. And what a story.
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49 days ago - Nonfiction cinema, bless its eclectic heart, keeps delivering the nifty novelty doc, and “Helvetica” is the latest such pleasure. Slight but distinctive, the film is both an absorbing consideration of the modern landscape’s dominant typeface and a contagiously appreciative salute to the designers who determine the look and feel of the letters and words we process on a daily basis.
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56 days ago - Sharpness and sweetness fuse splendidly in “Juno,” a teen comedy for mature funny bones and wit-craving minds. Keen, engaging and warmhearted beneath its surface cool, the movie is a small sparkler that merits serious attention amid the bigger-bang year-end fare.
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56 days ago - The much anticipated “I am Legend” will not become one, distinguishing itself neither by excellence nor humiliating failure, but a marked lack of definition. As if intimidated, the work smothers itself with caution and ambivalence, its successes arriving in scattered moments of potency.
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56 days ago - “Alvin and the Chipmunks” finds the trio lost and further out of their element than the story of the rodents’ move from the woods would suggest. They’re off course by a half-century, or in other words a lot has changed between Alvin Chipmunk and Snoop Dogg.
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56 days ago - Francis Ford Coppola, il padrone of Bay Area filmmakers and creator of some of the most memorable movie moments of the last 35 years, has been in something of a slump.
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