Category: Reviews
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Films Feminism Forgot: Harriet Craig (1950)
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Read more: Films Feminism Forgot: Harriet Craig (1950)A marriage without children is not only pointless, but arguably as dangerous as plutonium.
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District 9 (2009)
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Read more: District 9 (2009)As action flicks go, District 9 excels beyond measure, but leave it to a genre film with B-movie splatter gore sensibility to create an immersive experience that generates more human pathos than a hundred overcooked dramas about the holocaust or racism.
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White Heat (1949)
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Read more: White Heat (1949)Goodfellas’ Joe Pesci won an Oscar for his Spider-squashing portrayal of a nutso mobster but when it comes to wiping people out he pales next to his forerunner, the similarly dwarfish Cagney. Good grief, the insane Cagney is a one-man army of death.
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A Few More Ruthless Villains: 80’s Action Edition
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Read more: A Few More Ruthless Villains: 80’s Action EditionA Few Ruthless Movie Villains is a popular article that I wrote a few years ago. Time flies, and it is now past time to honor some more unsavory bad guys, this time, 80’s Action style. I will concentrate on the attributes or tags of villain, bully, and sheer nastiness. Most of the movies are…
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Witness For the Prosecution
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Read more: Witness For the ProsecutionWitness for the Prosecution is a Billy Wilder classic based on the novel by Agatha Christie. There are many great courtroom drama movies, like 12 Angry Men, with plot surprises, turns and twists, but there is no other movie like this one for a shocking and unexpected conclusion. This film is one of the very best.…
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Naughty Postcards from a Hungarian Trashmeister
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Read more: Naughty Postcards from a Hungarian TrashmeisterSordid glory. Would you call that the defining trait of writer Joe Eszterhas’ distinctive body of work? After all, this is the man who cooked up Basic Instinct, Sliver and Showgirls in his steamy, body-filled kitchen. Most screenwriters dawdle in obscurity, even if their creative juice results in a colossal hit, but Eszterhas gained notoriety…
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Starring Debuts #25: Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future (1985)
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Read more: Starring Debuts #25: Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future (1985)Fox was a lightweight actor, his limitations exposed whenever he took on stuff with any gravity, such as a rape-objecting grunt in Casualties of War or a cokehead loser in Bright Lights, Big City. Man, does he not sit right in those two flicks, but as a bewildered Californian schoolboy frantically trying to save his…
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Top 10 Romantic Movies that won’t make you want to shoot up your local Ann Taylor
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Read more: Top 10 Romantic Movies that won’t make you want to shoot up your local Ann TaylorAll movies have a love story—I don’t say that in vain, in college I had two screenwriting professors (both working, agented and credited) who hammered the point home “Every movie has a love story—remember that, Mr. Cobb.” “I understand.” “Do you? Because I’m sixty pages into your college-student-with-a-shotgun script and I haven’t detected a note…
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Poor Things
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Read more: Poor ThingsAt the very first heartbeat of this outrageously original and beautiful movie, I was hypnotized and hooked. From viewing the awful offal of the cutting room, training fledgling surgeons, to the delicious, but captivating Frankensteinean reality of Bella baby, mother and child, this project of Yorgos Lanthimos was something extra-special. A pregnant suicide was rescued…
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Starring Debuts # 24: Sissy Spacek in Badlands (1973)
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Read more: Starring Debuts # 24: Sissy Spacek in Badlands (1973)Some people need a good, hard slap to wake them the fuck up and there would be no more deserving recipient than Holly Sargis (Spacek). She’s vapid, easily led and amoral, a freckled, baton-twirling fifteen-year-old girl who barely mutters a word of protest during the murder of her father. “Are you gonna be OK?” she…