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‘Brighton Rock’ Remake Fails to Justify its Existence
Rating: 2.5/5.0CHICAGO– Rowan Joffe’s long-gestating remake of “Brighton Rock” (the 1947 noir classic was based on the beloved book by Graham Greene) raises the question least-desired in one of these...
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Lars Von Trier’s Mesmerizing ‘Melancholia’ Turns Depression Into Art
Rating: 5.0/5.0CHICAGO– Lars Von Trier’s “Melancholia” is a mesmerizing, haunting portrayal of the world-shattering force of depression from a filmmaker who has first-hand knowledge of the debilitating...
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‘Immortals’ is Model of a Modern Major Epic
Rating: 3.5/5.0CHICAGO– The sword and sandals epic has been around since the costume department fashioned the first toga. A modern take on this tried-and-true story line is “Immortals,” using the...
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Stoic Gary Oldman Uncovers ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’
Rating: 3.5/5.0CHICAGO– Espionage sure isn’t like it used to be. The new film “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is set during the Cold War period of the early 1970s, when lines were drawn by their...
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Billy Bob Thornton’s ‘Jayne Mansfield’s Car’ Stalls Out
Rating: 2.0/5.0CHICAGO– There was a time when it looked like not only would Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton be one of our great actors but possibly a threat behind the camera as well. Everyone knows...
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Annoying, Inconsistent ‘Charlie Countryman’ with Shia LaBeouf
Rating: 1.5/5.0CHICAGO– What happens when you give people two months in Romania to make a movie about a lost soul dealing with grief, love, drug use, and general excess? You get a spoiled, bizarre,...
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‘Snowpiercer’ is a Wild Ride, One-of-a-Kind Dystopia
Rating: 3.5/5.0CHICAGO– Travelers. We are travelers in this life, and metaphorically we’re mostly in coach, but sometimes manage to get some first class treatment. What if all this traveling were...
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‘A’ for Effort, ‘C’ for Execution in Dwayne Johnson’s Unmemorable ‘Hercules’
Rating: 2.5/5.0CHICAGO– I empathize with Dwayne Johnson and simultaneously don’t. Most people never get rich and famous once let alone twice. Sure, it’s hard to rebrand people from the wrestling...
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Natalie Portman Embodies a Magnificent ‘Jackie’
Rating: 5.0/5.0CHICAGO– Capturing one of the most familiar woman of the last fifty years would seem impossible, except when focusing on one of the defining moments of her life. “Jackie” reveals...
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