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One Room Country Shack: Quentin Tarantino Unleashes The Hateful Eight
Some movies come with a colorful history, meaning that their road to the big screen has been rather unusual. One of those is Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight. Originally designed as a follow-up to the successful Django Unchained, the director temporarily scrapped the whole project because a first draft of the screenplay had been leaked […]
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Lone Star State of Mind: Hotel Dallas is in Romania
I saw some documentaries at this year’s Berlin film festival ‘Berlinale’. As this year’s winner of the Golden Bear is another documentary by Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi I felt motivated to write a rating for Hotel Dallas. A Romanian- American production by Sherng-Lee Huang and Livia Ungur. The semi-documental film circles around the fact that […]
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Pick Up the Pieces: Leonardo DiCaprio is The Revenant
Alejandro González Iñarritu is the most versatile director of our time. After the highly complex Birdman, which reflects on media and show business in a self-referential way, he surprises the public with a movie which couldn’t be baser. It reminds me of the famous quote by Auguste Rodin, ‘I choose a block of marble and […]
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Double Agents: Guy Ritchie Reveals The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Pop culture has always been captivated by the Cold War. Back in the day, its backdrop spawned the longest-tenured blockbuster movie franchise ever, the James Bond series. This fascination with spies from the East-West conflict has never ceased, particularly so with Hollywood reenacting television shows and feature films from that era. The latest example is […]
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A New Chapter: J.J. Abrams Introduces the Next Generation to Star Wars: The Force Awakens
‘Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…’ Every part of the Star Wars franchise begins with that fairy tale opening and John Williams’s trademark fanfare, and each time, the diehard fans have been passionate about it. A decade after George Lucas’s final film in the series, the latest installment, Episode VII: The […]
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Ghost in the Machine: Daniel Craig’s James Bond Hunts Sam Mendes’s Spectre
‘James Bond will return…’ Barring a short period in the early 1990s, when the future of the series was up in the air thanks to legal issues, this statement has been as sure as death and taxes for more than five solid decades. Three years after the gargantuan success of Skyfall, the British super spy […]
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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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Broadway The Hard Way: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, or the Psyche of an Actor
Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu had already been a known commodity in Hollywood circles for a while. His debut feature, Amores Perros, became a fan favorite, while his U.S. projects 21 Grams, Babel, and Biutiful landed him the star power of Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Sean Penn, or Javier Bardem. With his fifth movie, Birdman: […]
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The Monster Is Loose: Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan as a Parable of Putin’s Russia?
Russian cinema has always commanded international respect, even when things were frosty between the Soviet Union and the ‘West.’ The same still holds true for the modern arthouse movies from the country. Since the early 2000s, Andrei Zvyagintsev has become one of the more distinguished Russian directors. Particularly because of the recent crisis between his […]
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Spybreak: Matthew Vaughn Introduces Us to Kingsman: The Secret Service
Parodies of spy pictures – and the James Bond variation in particular – are a dime a dozen, with a fairly mixed bag of results. The cream of the crop may be the first two Austin Powers movies, International Man Of Mystery and The Spy Who Shagged Me. The low point is arguably a spoof […]
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Food, Glorious Food: Chef Jon Favreau Goes Back to the Roots
In Hollywood, Jon Favreau has become a household name as the man at the helm of the Iron Man trilogy. While he admittedly did a commendable job as the director of the first two movies from that franchise, he actually started out as an indie comedy filmmaker. Chef, a pet project of his, sees the […]
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Tyranny of Souls: James Franco and Seth Rogen Conduct The Interview
Despite the fact that most comedies involving Seth Rogen have generally been subject to debate, none of them has stirred as big a controversy as The Interview. A political comedy about real-life North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the film has been threatened by the Pyongyang regime for months, leading to Sony Pictures becoming the victim […]
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Fight the Good Fight: Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies, or the End of an Era
Although fans and critics alike haven’t been completely satisfied with the results, the first two parts of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy have been among the biggest-grossing movies in recent years. One of the chief criticisms about the film series has always been that the director made a 300-page children’s book by J.R.R. Tolkien stretch […]
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Shock the Monkey: Matt Reeves Brings Us the Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes
French novelist Pierre Boulle’s alternative universe in which apes rule the planet has long fascinated Hollywood. It spawned five movies between 1968 and 1974, a TV series, plus a remake in the early 2000s. Those releases have been a mixed bag. The original Planet Of The Apes starring Charlton Heston is universally considered a classic, […]