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![]() Marilyn Monroe didn’t want to appear in River of No Return, nor did Otto Preminger want to direct it, especially if Marilyn was to star. Studio contracts forced them into it and we’re all the better for it today. River of No Return is a fine mid-Fifties Western, with surprising Italian root…
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Marilyn sings: Let it wash over you.
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![]() All About Eve is surely one of the greatest Best Pictures most people have never seen. It won six Oscars: Best Picture, Best Screenplay & Best Director to the extraordinary Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Best Costume Design to Charles Le Maire & Edith Head the Costume Doctor, Best Supporting Actor to Ge…
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A Bumpy Night at a Glamorous Party
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![]() There’s No Business Like Show Business and there was no show business phonier than vaudeville, till movies. So an overtly phony movie about vaudeville makes for a phony convergence. It was perhaps the last of the musical extravaganzas, a calorically rich compendium of Irving Berlin’s showstoppi…
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Marilyn Monroe & Donald O'Connor: Sta...
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![]() The Arab Spring comes alive in Tyrant, the most politically important TV series to come along in – well – a long time. Palace intrigue swirls around the fictional Al Fayeed family, tyrannical rulers of the fictional Arab country Abbudin. Their prodigal son returns from Los Angeles in the prem…
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The Sopranos have got nothing on them
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![]() Get on Up joins the pantheon of great rock biopics, memorializing James Brown as a seminal rockstar whose power, pomp and circumstances paved the way for the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, Sly & the Family Stone, hip-hop and every other form of funkable & funkadelic music. Get on Up gets on…
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James Brown ✫ Please, Please, Pleas...
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![]() The Hundred-Foot Journey is a feel-good, foodie movie starring Helen Mirren set in provincial France. Mature date-night movie choices get no safer. Predictable as a brasserie menu, it’s equivalently satisfying.
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Well Put Together Woman
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![]() Audrey Hepburn is the spoon-full-of-sugar who makes the cultural imperialism go down in Funny Face. Stanley Donen’s musical – done Broadway style – is an intoxicating Vogue-tini, a Size 0 fashion fantasy. Richard Avedon famously created the opening titles, which are perfectly high fashion. …
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Avedon's timeless portrait of Hepburn
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![]() Love and Death made me a Woody Allen fan, a film so funny, so smart, a film like I’d never seen before. Being but 15 at the time, how could it be otherwise. One of Woody’s great comedies, Love and Death remains pleasantly absurd, if no longer bellylaugh funny, yet still unspools a plethora o…
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Sexy LOL: Woody & the Countess
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![]() Is there a more enjoyable Elmore Leonard movie or charismatic John Travolta movie than Get Shorty? So what if it’s a trifle, a light crime-comedy. It’s a movie about the love of movies, which it celebrates with sleek Hollywood panache, rich Elmore Leonard flair and charming details. In short, *…
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Chili Palmer gets lost in Touch of Evil
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![]() Fascinating history lessons are rarely tremendously entertaining, yet The Madness of King George is both. Frequently funny, often charming, it’s nevertheless chockablock with important historical insights about the British government, crown and class system, and the ignorant barbarity of pre-mo…
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Dissolute Prince behind dignified King
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