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Masterminds
Good 83 Points 2016

Masterminds starts off rock-and-roll, but soon becomes dumb-and-dumber, only not so funny or charming. Loosely “based on a true story”, it oscillates between parody and homage, albeit more the former given its deep SNL roots. Unfortunately, TV-quality sketch comedy bits don’t a great movie make…

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WikChip Video Comedy Great: Kate McKinnon
Hostiles
Great 83 Points 2017

The American Indian Wars were mostly over by 1892. Bad blood ran deep, with bands of crazed killers roaming the land, as other combatants tried to move on with life after wartime. Writer-director Scott Cooper adroitly uses this brutal and beautiful milieu for a piercing story about a cavalry capt…

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Chappaquiddick
Really Great 83 Points 2018

Being a Kennedy came with compulsions, including sailing, drinking, womanizing and the presidency, those last with fatal effect. Ted Kennedy’s date with death didn’t lead to another dead Kennedy, but to the manslaughter of a loyal supporter: Mary Jo Kopechne, a name familiar to baby-boomers acros…

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WikChip Video She didn't drown. She suffocated, slo...
Gold
Great 83 Points 2016

Matthew McConaughey rode the tiger (yet again) in the under-titled Gold, the truthy tale of a hard-living, third-gen miner who never ever gives up hope. This Weinstein Company release revels in peeping at the rise, fall, rise and fall of a quasi-rapacious capitalist kook. From the Left, revenge…

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WikChip Image Gold digger closes in on paydirt
Kill the Irishman
Great 83 Points 2011

Who knew there was another only-in-America mobster story ideally suited for a biographical crime movie? Kill the Irishman is that movie and Danny Greene is the mobster it brings to life, a self-made man who rose to run a large swath of the Cleveland rackets in the Seventies. It’s a rich story, …

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WikChip Video Smart, Perspicacious, Controlled, Brutal
First Man
Very Good 83 Points 2018

First Man is a forced march, joyless despite the profoundly joyous – if harrowing – adventure it chronicles. One disaster or near-disaster after another, and then … triumph. Some of this stems from the nearly inchoate mid-century man that was Neal Armstrong and some from his joyless marriage….

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WikChip Video How They Do It, in Hollywood
Bohemian Rhapsody
Very Good 83 Points 2018

Queen were never one of my bands. No Queen on vinyl, nor even any in my pocket. Sure, I was awed by the rangy brilliance of Bohemian Rhapsody, plus well entertained by the propulsive insouciance of Killer Queen and pop perfection of Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But the fascist commercial…

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WikChip Video Legendary Set
Can You Ever Fo...
OK 83 Points 2018

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is not unforgivably bad, but is hardly a good movie either. The small stakes crimes of a literary criminal and her wages of sin trigger our morbid fascination with human train wrecks.

Is that so bad? No, but it ain’t enough to be fulfilling. Ultimately just OK, Melis…

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Rocketman
Great 83 Points 2019

“The bitch is back” in this rockstar revenge pic. Rockumentary in spirit and phantasmagoric in production, Rocketman is a largely satisfying dip in the deep well of Elton John’s bottomless self-regard.

Studded with bits of fantasy, Rocketman is more Across the Universe

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Letters from Iw...
Great 83 Points 2006

Letters from Iwo Jima is the stunning coda to Flags Of Our Fathers, this time from the Japanese side. Amongst other revelations, it shows how poorly served were the Imperial Japanese soldiers, not by their gallant and honorable commander, but by the suicidal tendencies of their martial tradi…

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