SEVEN POUNDS

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Will Smith must be cinema illiterate. Maybe that’s why he frowns throughout Seven Pounds. A glib, charming movie star—but resourceless actor—Smith must think scrunching-up his face and looking worried for two hours shows serious concentration and emotional gravity. Apparently, he is unaware of the ways that movies and movie stars communicate depth and sincerity. Seven
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THE WRESTLER

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Hype for Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler is an embarrassment; the excellent actor has had greater roles and given more interesting performances (his tabloid exploits notwithstanding). As a middle-aged, small-time wrestler living in a New Jersey trailer, Rourke’s Randy “Ram Jam” Robinson tells his estranged daughter, “Now I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat, and
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CHE

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“How does it feel to be a symbol?” Benicio del Toro is asked in his role as Che Guevara. “Of what?” he replies and is told: “The revolution.” But in Che, Steven Soderbergh’s two-part art thing, this revolution is about style—not politics. After decades as a poster boy for counterculture hipness, Che Guevara provides Soderbergh
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THE READER

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Harvey Weinstein and the ghosts of producers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella are hoping everyone this holiday season will want to see The Reader’s love story about former S.S. guard Hannah Shmitz (Kate Winslet) and the teenage boy she sexually initiates in the late 1950s and the cloud of remorse it casts over his adult
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DOUBT

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Religion has taken a beating in the current political climate, so John Patrick Shanley puts his Broadway play Doubt on screen pragmatically—as a showcase for our most revered, grandstanding actors. Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman play Sister Aloysius Beauvier and Father Brendan Flynn who, in the early 1960s, butt heads at The Bronx’s St.
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IF YOU LIKED IT, THEN YOU SHOULDA PUT A WIG ON IT

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It’s Obama time and black artists still suffer segregation. How else to explain the Gotham Independent Film Awards ignoring Cadillac Records, the most excitingly performed American movie this year? Cadillac Records tells a story of black popular music—its rapidly changing phases during the 1950s from the blues to race records, from rock ’n’ roll to
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FROSTY RECEPTION

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Ron Howard shows his stupidity by adapting Peter Morgan’s stage play Frost/Nixon into a pseudo-TV documentary. Another of the year’s endless liberal propaganda strategies, it unsubtly displays the sanctimony that has accrued to TV journalism—in fact, Howard enshrines it. Frost/Nixon dramatizes the series of 1977 TV interviews that British chat host David Frost did with
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JAILBAIT

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Baz Luhrmann’s Australia isn’t a history of the penal colony turned commonwealth, but Luhrmann’s absurd, cliché-ridden filmmaking ought to be a jailable offense. In this three-hour chick-flick melodrama, Nicole Kidman (as Lady Sarah Ashley) goes down under where her philandering landowner husband was killed; she takes over the Faraway Downs ranch and hires the Drover
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TRANSCENDENT THRILL DRIVE

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Nothing in cinema this week is more important than Transporter 3. It’s been a long time since a new movie has been so spiritually and aesthetically exhilarating. Producer Luc Besson, director Olivier Megaton and star Jason Statham work at the top of their imagination and abilities—not like they’re completing a formulaic sequel but reinventing the
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I AM; I AM SUPERMAN

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America’s chief pop cultural obsession of the past 80 odd years contains a rarely discussed dark side. Call it Superhero Derangement Syndrome: the relentless fixation on an unattainable fantasy of crime fighting with otherworldly powers. While such dreamy identification first gained traction as catharsis—perhaps when Superman battled Adolf Hitler, courtesy of DC Comics—it has since
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