Blogs

The old-fashioned cancer weeper — a genre that includes pictures like Love Story, Brian’s Song, and the gold standard of chemocathartic melodrama, Terms of Endearment — has been in short supply these days

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Savvier and less cartoonish than those posters of Mark Wahlberg with stacks of cash taped to his famous torso might have you believe, Contraband is a remake of the 2008 Icelandic smuggling thriller Reykjavík-Rotterdam, directed by the original's star, Baltasar Kormákur.

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It can be difficult to remember who we're meant to be rooting for in the Underworld universe, with its unending werewolf/vampire feud, betrayals, hybrids, bloodlines, forbidden romances and immortal daddy issues.

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In Roman Polanski’s Carnage, two couples square off in a 4-way — or is it a 48-way? — skirmish involving parenting issues, class resentment, the self-centered nature of our society, and both sexual politics and the other kind.

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As a general rule in the movies, dysfunction is better offered as a side dish rather than a main course, accenting what’s really a story of grieving and letting go, or coming of age, or self-acceptance.

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<p>As I’ve mentioned, I’ve never been the type to get hives over the remake announcements that seem to crop up in the trades every other day, or who feels that a bad redo can somehow denigrate its original.  Keep reading

No one is safe in Contagion — not from the MEV-1 virus that ricochets out of a crowded Macau casino to cut down a sizable selection of the global population with frightening plausibility, and not from Steven Soderbergh’s pitiless refusal to abide by the unspoken rules of the mainstream movie.

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When you look at this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Actress, one thing that sticks out is the number of nude scenes the actresses have appeared in. Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married), Angelina Jolie (Changeling), Kate Winslet (The Reader) - these are beautiful and mega-talented young women who have never shied away from on-camera nudity. Their nominations got me thinking about the nature of female sexuality in films.

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