SCHOOLYARD NERD TO HIP HIP STAR

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Not long after The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Christopher Wallace) was killed in 1997, a grieving Voletta Wallace made this candid admission about her late son’s hip-hop records: “He used filthy language because the stories he was telling were filthy.” But Notorious, a new biopic about the late rapper, does not share the ambivalence of a
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CHERRY BLOSSOMS

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Doris Dorrie is best known for the 1985 German film Men, a modest feminist comedy taking on sexual hierarchies. Its praise made Dorrie the Sofia Coppola of her day, celebrated as a standard-bearing female director. But unlike Coppola, Dorrie actually examined her characters social and psychological circumstances—perhaps because she had a fundamental connection to feminist
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MADE IN THE U.S.A

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In grad school at Columbia, we were able to study a private print of Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. Never theatrically released in America, its scarcity made it special, so I watched it repeatedly. It was one of the experiences that made me unafraid of movie art; drawn-in by Godard’s dense narrative and thrilled by
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SILENT LIGHT (STELLET LICHT)

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Mexico’s critically overrated Carlos Reygadas is unlikely to breakthrough to popular acclaim with his latest film, Stellet Licht, while Mexico’s highly publicized “Three Amigos”—Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro Gonzáles Iñáritu and Guillermo del Toro—are just that: commercial clowns. Between these camps stands Julián Hernández, Mexico’s finest filmmaker with the greatest human touch—which may be why his masterpieces
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TELLING STORIES

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Imagination is Adam Sandler’s response to bad times. As Bedtime Stories’ hotel employee Skeeter Bronson, Sandler helps his single-parent sister (Courteney Cox) during her new job search by babysitting his niece and nephew. He tells them bedtime stories that spur their own fantasies and—magically—come true in his own life. This is an inspired metaphor for
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DEFIANCE

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Torn between making an art movie and an uplifting entertainment feature, Edward Zwick can’t stop the gun-battles and genocide of his Holocaust movie Defiance from seeming like cheap thrills and mawkishness. It’s time for Zwick to man-up to his intelligence and go for broke. Defiance needed the moral and formal rigor of a Jean-Marie Straub
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CHRISTMASTIME FOR NAZIS

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Spoiler Alert: Tom Cruise’s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg of Germany’s Tenth Panzer Division does not kill Adolf Hitler in Valkyrie. Although director Bryan Singer and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander devote the film’s plot to dramatizing von Stauffenberg’s historically correct plan, they get no deeper than telling audiences what they already know. Singer’s approach
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REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

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As The Wheelers, a perfect-seeming, golden-blond, white American middle-class married couple in Revolutionary Road, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet press all the high-drama buttons, yet they don’t resemble anyone anybody actually knows. Their marital problems, based on each person’s sulky personality—Frank’s a restless philanderer, April’s a frustrated artist, they’re both jealous of each other—could fill
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THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

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It takes almost three hours for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to wind down and approximate the climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s fascinating image of a gigantic embryo floating in space and contemplating the Earth—then the audience—combined absurdity and magnificence. All mankind’s historical experience and scientific knowledge was distilled to
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YES MAN

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Most of the year-end movies look terrible after the Frank Borzage DVDs. The serious films repulse. The entertainment films bore. Even Jim Carrey misfires with Yes Man by playing Carl Allen, a depressed cynic who listens to a motivational speaker (Terence Stamp) then decides to embrace every life opportunity. Carl’s new ethic is exploited by
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