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Schindler's List, 20 Years Later
AP-Photo/Douglas C. PizacUniversal has just brought out a 20th-anniversary Blu-ray edition of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust movie, Schindler's List. Don't blame whoever got stuck writing the box...
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Advice for Escaping Film's Winter Doldrums
First released in 1970, Tristana is one of the masterpieces of Spanish director Luis Bunuel's astonishing late-life creative spree after his return to Europe from exile in Mexico. Newly out on Blu-ray...
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Before You Know It, Change Happens
Movie Still/Mike SimpsonAt SXSW, a festival geared toward the young, beautiful, and hip, I’m guessing few expected to be bowled over by a documentary film about aging and aged gay men. But Before You...
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A Season of Swords
HBOOnce again, it's that splendid time of year when we get to cast aside human decency without a backward look. Let's savor ruthless ambition, revel in permanent war, and realize we don't give two...
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Tired of TV's Golden Age?
Courtesy of erbpIt is a truth universally acknowledged that TV has surpassed the movies as the medium of choice for the discerning viewer. Since the evolutionary leap that was “The Sopranos,” episodic...
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Da Gr8 Gatsbee
AP Photo, FileThe book will still be around in the morning. That's the best advice I can give anyone appalled by the mere existence of director Baz Luhrman's 3-D, darn near transcendently tasteless...
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Star Bleck
flickr/skookums 1Quick quiz: which movie currently in theaters does worst by a beloved national classic, "modernizing" it in ways that violate everything people cherished about the original? If you...
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Greta Gerwig, Dancing with Herself
Comic actress Greta Gerwig has a versatile look—indolent or boyish, athletic or glamorous, always blond and beautiful but with broad shoulders and doughy cheeks that make her resemble an improbably...
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The Great Gandolfini
AP Images/Barry WetcherThere's a distinction to be made between dying too young and dying too soon. The first connotes unfulfilled promise: Heath Ledger, for instance, was barely beginning to realize...
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Burning Down the (White) House
AP Photo/Sony Columbia Pictures, Reiner BajoHere’s a confession likely to guarantee you’ll never trust me again: I had a pretty good time at White House Down, the new movie starring Channing Tatum as a...
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All Tomorrow’s Parties
AP Photo/The Omaha World-Herald, Brynn AndersonCall it coincidence, but my bedside reading for the past couple of weeks has been the new two-volume boxed set of the Library of America’s Reporting Civil...
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Vacant Beauty, Boredom, and The Bling Ring
AP Images/Matt SaylesNext month my 15-year-old son, Miles, starts Calabasas High, which lies wedged between the palaces of the community for which the school is named and Topanga Canyon where we live,...
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Last Day of a Young Black Man
AP Images/Ron KobererThree hours before the advance screening of Fruitvale Station I attended in Chicago, a line of eager fans snaked through the Cineplex. Many were dressed up, hair done right, faces...
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Not That Exciting
AP Images/Paola Ardizzoni/Emilio PeredaI'm So Excited! might have made a good 15-minute sequence in one of Pedro Almodovar's bubbly movies of the '80s and early '90s, when he was more or less...
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Artificial Love
Like HAL, except way, way nicer.Could you fall in love with Siri? OK, let's not say Siri in particular, since Siri is as dumb as a stump and doesn't understand anything you ask her. But what about a...
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More Than a Teenage Dream
AP Images/Matt SaylesThe Spectacular Now easily earns the epithet of teen film, a genre known more for its box-office potential than festival and critic buzz. It has all the makings of another...
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Morally Compromised Art, on the Big Screen
A scene from the upcoming film of Ender's Game.Look around the internet at any list of the best science fiction novels of all time, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game will be at or near the top (see...
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"Blue Jasmine" Another Black Mark
AP Images/Andrew MedichiniThe new movie, Blue Jasmine, has been so wildly embraced by critics, while being so replete with its writer-director’s worst tendencies, that it provides the best example in...
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