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In the Cards: Christian Bale is Terrence Malick’s Knight Of Cups
Terrence Malick remains an enigma. First, the reclusive director vanished from the filmmaking landscape for two solid decades between his sophomore effort Days Of Heaven and the acclaimed The Thin Red Line. Then, he returns with a new movie every other year from 2011’s The Tree Of Life on, after never having spent less than […]
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Home by the Sea: Ray Milland Welcomes The Uninvited
Horror films were popular in the United States in the 1940s, in spite of the Second World War and the feel-good stories Hollywood brought to the silver screen to distract the people. Russian-born writer and producer Val Lewton, in particular, managed to attract a cult following with masterful B-movies such as Cat People, I Walked […]
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Future Management: Funny and Romantic Disaster Control in The New Year Calling Plan
New Year’s is an entirely different beast in Russia than in most other countries. For historical reasons, it’s basically Christmas and the rest of the holiday season rolled into one. The turn of the year is what Russians celebrate big time, and it’s also when they receive their gifts. That is why every December romantic, […]
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The Millionaire Waltz: Rekindling the ‘Roaring Twenties’ in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby
With his leading role in Baz Luhrmann’s modern version of Romeo & Juliet, Leonardo DiCaprio burst onto the Hollywood scene in grand style in 1996. So when the news spread that the charismatic superstar and the director of the Oscar-winning musical Moulin Rouge! would reunite for an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The […]
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Be Quick or Be Dead: The Rebirth of the ‘Spaghetti Western’ in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
The release of a Quentin Tarantino movie is always an event, and it has been ever since the director took Hollywood by storm with his debut Reservoir Dogs and his sophomore effort Pulp Fiction about two decades ago. It’s not too hard to see why. People simply dig the coolness and the mystique surrounding his […]
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Sail Away Sweet Sister: Early Alfred Hitchcock Rediscovered in Graham Cutts’s The White Shadow
Now that we’ve survived the apocalypse and the end of 2012, let’s kick off the new year with a piece of early cinema long considered lost forever. Most of us know Alfred Hitchcock as a director of thrillers and, occasionally, bizarre comedies, who frequently adapted novels, short stories, and plays for the screen. Yet few […]
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Countdown to Extinction: What if Tomorrow Never Comes in Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World
So December 21st, 2012, has finally arrived, and we’re still alive and well – despite a myriad of (drug-inflicted) doomsday scenarios and predictions. Disaster movies have sprung up like mushrooms in recent years, tackling the question what you would do if you knew your time was short. Think Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster 2012 and countless others. […]
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Falling into Infinity: The Bottom Line on the Indie Epic Cloud Atlas by Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis
A big-budget independent movie based on a novel considered to be ‘unfilmable’ – that sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn’t it? Three renowned directors still made the daring choice to tackle David Mitchell’s 2004 book Cloud Atlas. They hired an international all-star cast consisting of the likes of Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, […]
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The Hidden Face
The Hidden Face (La Cara Oculta), is a surprising gem of a film. The film is set in the sprawling city of Bogota, Columbia. A well-respected conductor from Spain by the name of Adrian (Quim Gutiérrez) falls in love with a girl named Belen (Clara Lago). The relationship is going great until one day she […]
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Sayonara Itsuka
In the 1960s, an ambitious businessman moves on assignment to Thailand in order to allow himself to be groomed for promotion in the airline business. His goals are large and his dreams equally so. Yatsuka seems to have everything figured out. He has a waiting bride in Japan, but a home run he hits, while […]
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Women in Love… – Close Encounters of a Different Kind in Julio Medem’s Room In Rome
What happens when two pretty girls stay at a hotel in Italy’s ’Eternal City’? That’s the simple but intriguing premise of Sex & Lucía director Julio Medem’s Spanish arthouse film Room In Rome. Sometimes it doesn’t take more than such a basic idea – an intimate play of two – for a provoking work, in […]
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Girls United: Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids as a Refreshing Take on a Male Genre
Comedies have always been treated like second-rate citizens at the Oscars. In contrast to the Golden Globes, which hand out separate awards for dramas and comedies, the Academy has downright neglected funny films for ages. It was therefore all the more surprising to see Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids – a movie that scooped no trophies at […]