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![]() Modern Family-style gender and role confusion provides ample grist for 90 minutes of scintillating cinematic fare in The Skeleton Twins. More sisters than brother & sister, said twins are played by Bill Hader & Kristen Wiig, confirming they’re the most talented SNL alumni on the scene today.
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More Sisters than Brother & Sister
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![]() The Salesman validates my love of movies by bringing to the screen a slice-of-life at once prosaic and yet theatrical, and insanely thrilling. It’s also familiar to a Western audience, though set in Iran. Yeah, it’s an Iranian movie, making it utterly fascinating to Westerners like me who are i…
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Asghar Farhadi describes his film
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![]() Two great movies, one bad title, The Place Beyond the Pines could lose 20 ticks and still be twice typical Hollywood fare. Ryan Gosling & Bradley Cooper play two guys on opposite sides of the law, whose paths cross to lethal effect. Both are conflicted and sympathetic. Neither is untarnishe…
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Eye Dropper TearTat -- nice touch
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![]() Call me crazy, but I find The Philadelphia Story inferior to Bringing Up Baby, its contemporaneous cousin. Katherine Hepburn’s comeback movie – the picture that cemented her status as a hit-making star – is a very fine romcom and an understandable member of seven American Film Institute all-t…
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Starburst: Grant, Hepburn, Stewart
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![]() A cheated wife gets her revenge in The Other Woman by stealing the movie from “the other woman”. That would be Leslie Mann stealing from Cameron Diaz, the big star and a natural as the other woman. Mann is hilarious as a kookie wife who gets not just the last laugh, but most every other one a…
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Leslie Mann upstages Cameron Diaz, again
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![]() The Legend of Tarzan is a ton of fun, notwithstanding being leavened by some seriously nasty business. How much fun? Most everyone around me were laughing and cheering by the third reel. One girl took to throwing her arms in the air at each thrilling turn. In the end, the entire theater applaud…
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Dishing about Jane's sex with Tarzan
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![]() Matt Damon succeeds grandly in The Last Duel, a gloriously old-fashioned yet manifestly modern movie. This epic hews closely to the apparent history of the last duel-to-the-death in medieval France, a time of knights-in-shining-armor during the Hundred Years’ War…
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The Last Duel - After the Ending
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![]() Sam Elliott deserves a Western-icon lifetime achievement award. Hey, that’d make a great little movie, if it included the behind-the-scenes angst of an elderly man facing his mortality, even as he’s feted by fans and groupies alike. The Hero is all that, albeit Elliott plays a less successful d…
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Kevin Smith interviews Sam Elliott & ...
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![]() A woman on the edge propels the oh-so-smart drama in this almost too clever movie. The story turns back in on itself time and again, not fully revealing its convergence till the end. An ultimately satisfying twist does come, though not before we’re asked to hang in through lots of puzzlingly se…
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OK, not from the movie, but Jennifer!!
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![]() Non football fans needn’t steer away from The Book of Manning, notwithstanding its status as a must-see for those of us who love America’s brutally beautiful game. That’s because this documentary about Archie Manning’s family follows the priorities he established within the family: family first,…
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3 little Mannings: Cooper, Eli & Peyton
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