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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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Great – if sadly flawed – exploration of the early California oil industry, dramatized through the exploits of an entrepreneurial ogre. A Chinatown for Oil, the movie serves as fascinating Golden State period piece and socialist screed, decrying the imagined crimes of tycoons as it celebrates … |
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The Wolf of Long Island celebrates a craven criminal: a coke snorting, lude popping, reverse Robin Hood. What’s that? The biopic about the demented Jordan Belfort is titled The Wolf of Wall Street. Really? He spent scant time there. Belfort and his entire operation are Long Islanders dow…
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Does this look like fun? Yes! No.
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The Way, Way Back is the perfect summer movie from this Summer of `13. It opens and closes with a painfully awkward teen in the late, lamented way-way-back of a 1970 Buick Estate Station Wagon. In between he spends a life-changing summer at the beach house of his mom’s asshole boyfriend, pl…
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Awkward boy meets way, way cool girl
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Tesla stands alone: the most mystical, the most gifted, the most freaky of the great industrial magnates, e.g., Edison, Westinghouse & J.P. Morgan, who also appear in this biopic of the Serbian-American inventor. From Zagreb, it presents as a bizarre movie where people’s mouths don’t match what’…
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Tesla meets J.P. Morgan. Edison fumes.
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Adult date night movies get no more surefire than The Railway Man. It starts with Nicole Kidman falling in love with Colin Firth on a train. He is – after all – the Railway Man. The pathos comes later, when we encounter the hell that Eric Lomax underwent as a POW, slave laborer for the infam…
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Nicole Kidman on meeting Patti Lomax
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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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Halfway through this crowd-pleasing movie, a senior citizen in the row behind us blurted out “This is a very good movie.” He’s right, albeit his exclamation is more telling than intended, as it conveys The Judge’s appeal to middle-agers of Robert Downey Jr’s generation and especially to those o…
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The Moviestars Are The Thing.
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A hypocritical indictment of conspicuous consumption, this bargain-basement satire never strikes beyond the obvious. Nominally attempting to bury the cult of brands, The Joneses instead praises them – name dropping and extolling cars, fragrances, golf clubs and all the effluvia touted in the a…
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Amber Heard: Generic hottie, generic ...
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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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