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The American  |  Director Anton Corbijn  |  Score: 6.1 Appropriately enough, the vast majority of guns in this American assassin abroad film are equipped with silencers, the bullets barely make a sound before slicing through their given targets. The film follows suit. In what could only be described as a deliberate pace, with great...
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Mesrine: Killer Instinct  |  Director Jean-François Richet |  Score: 7.6 Jacques Mesrine was a renowned gangster in France, well-known for his brutal murders, kidnapping, bank robberies and extortion in the ’60s and ’70s, but made legendary for his sneering arrogance and ultra-confident air, a combination of Dillinger and Liam Gallagher. As portrayed by Vincent...
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Life During Wartime  |  Director Todd Solondz  |  Score: 6.4 The story (possibly apocryphal) goes that when Kafka used to read “Metamorphosis” to his friends, he’d bust up laughing. To him, the idea of young man suddenly turning into a cockroach and scurrying around his cramped bedroom as the rest of his family lived...
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A Prophet: Blu-ray Edition  |  Director Jacques Audiard |  Score: 7.4 At first, the French prison young Malik El Djebana (Tahar Rahim) is sent to seems strangely civilized, at least in comparison to its American counterpart. Prisoners are given individual cells, the showers have stalls, and the bread — long and crusty — is...
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Dinner for Schmucks  |  Director Jay Roach  |  Score: 5.7 Cruelty can be an extremely tasty spice when paired properly with a steaming dish of savory comedy. The merciless mashing of our hopeful expectations combined with human callousness creates a sludge of comic gold, a la Larry David, Woody Allen and the boys and...
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I started listening to this guy and his band in 1970. They were doing stuff that was magic to my ears, and it still is.  I never tire of it and if it is some show that I have never heard, I love finding it and hearing it.  “They’re a band beyond description,” the...
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M. – The Criterion Blu-ray Edition  |  Director Fritz Lang  |  Score: 9.4 A luminous masterwork from Fritz Lang. The story of a child murderer let loose upon an unnamed German city is less about heroes and villains than it is an examination of the basic laws of society in the face of what...
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Agora  |  Director Alejandro Amenábar  |  Score: 6.0 During intermission of a play on an ancient stage in 300 A.D. Alexandria, a young philosophy student suddenly stands up before the crowd. Pledging his love and devotion to his beautiful philosophy professor, he begins to play a kind of ancient recorder in her honor. As...
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The Kids Are All Right  |  Director Lisa Cholodenko  |  Score: 7.4 The characters and lives in Lisa Cholodenko’s films always appear fully realized and well-lived in, like a closet filled with slightly wrinkled and worn clothes. Her previous works, including Dinner Party, High Art and Laurel Canyon all gather their estimable power from...
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Salt  |  Director Philip Noyce  |  Score: 3.6 According to the film’s production notes, the screenplay was penned by a man named Kurt Wimmer, a screenwriter with a dozen other titles under his belt, but having seen this trampy action thriller from director Philip Noyce, we know better. I think we’re witnessing the first-ever...
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