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The Death of St...
Good 66 Points 2018

Cults of personality hit peak absurdity when their object dies, as vividly satired in The Death of Stalin. Unfortunately, this political comedy is more smart than funny. Hence, its LOLs are few and far between.

Stalin funny? Yeah, even though he stands nearly alone in megalomaniacal evil, be…

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WikChip Video The Banality of Evil, Satired
My Week with Ma...
Good 66 Points 2011

Showbiz legends Marilyn Monroe, Lawrence Olivier, Vivien Leigh & Arthur Miller give My Week with Marilyn more sizzle than it deserves. A cinematic goddess descends to live amongst the hoi polloi and everyone loses their minds, the men mostly, the women indirectly through their men. Marilyn’s al…

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WikChip Video Marilyn visits Eton, boys go crazy.
United
OK 17 Points 2011

A dramatic tale of Manchester United in the 50’s and the Munich air crash that killed 8 team members. As with most sports movies, Manchester starts with the usual formula: work hard, come from behind, do great things. Then Munich happened. Just like you’d expect, things got depressing – de…

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Gentlemen Prefe...
OK 66 Points 1953

A sparkling Marilyn Monroe and one terrific song don’t fully rescue this Howard Hawks musical-comedy from the dregs of cheesiness. The song? Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, a theatrically produced Song and Dance number performed by the inimitable MM in an iconic pink dress

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WikChip Video Watch this and skip the movie.
The House on Te...
OK 66 Points 1951

The House on Telegraph Hill is a triumph of art direction. That’s good. It’s also unintentionally campy. That’s bad. The result is a just OK movie, yet one that belongs in the San Francisco Cinema Hall of Fame.

The views are marvelous. And the views are the thing with San Francisco real…

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WikChip Image Grt Views, Lrg House, fake Telegraph ...
The Grandmaster
OK 66 Points 2013

Stately to a fault, reverential to an extreme, The Grandmaster is kung fu cinema elevated to formal art. Stodginess aside, it no doubt lingers in the mind’s eye of hard core kung fu fans, let alone for the legendary Ip Man’s disciples. For the rest of us – focused on the Bruce Lee connection …

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WikChip Image Hey, isn't that little Bruce Lee?
Ip Man 2: Legen...
OK 66 Points 2010

Ip Man 2 was supposed to focus on the legendary Grandmaster’s relationship with Bruce Lee, his most famous disciple. But Lee’s descendants didn’t go along with the plan, so the movie ends up being about Ip Man’s post-war struggles to establish Wing Chun kung fu in colonial Hong Kong. The resul…

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WikChip Image Ip Man teaches Wing Chun kung fu
The Other Side ...
OK 66 Points 2001

A Mormon missionary’s time in Tonga makes for an entertaining family movie, if you can leave the proselytizing aside. The Other Side of Heaven is also an appealing period piece, first in the 1950s United States, but mostly in the South Pacific Islands of that era.

Based on the biography of …

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WikChip Image Before she was a star: Anne Hathaway
Big Night
OK 71 Points 1996

Delectable dishes and a beloved cast can’t rescue Stanley Tucci’s passion project. It’s hardly a bad movie, just a bit slow and stilted. Some miscasting and more than a little waiting around are mostly to blame.

That said, entrepreneurs of all stripes can benefit from seeing Big Night, a cas…

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WikChip Video Il Timpano: A dish to die for.
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The Outsider
OK 17 Points 2018

A dark and violent American prisoner in 1950’s postwar japan becomes affiliated with a gang in Osaka as sort of an enforcer. The main character’s role was awkward and didn’t really make sense, and even worse, parts were almost offensive as you learned what he left behind for his new life as…

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