9 years ago
261 results found for: under the skin
Blu-Ray Review: “Muppets Most Wanted”
Label: Buena Vista Home Entertainment
MSRP: $26.99
Release Date: August 12, 2014
Region A
Buy at Best Buy
Film: A- / Video: A- / Audio: A- / Extras: B+
In 2011, Jim Henson's Muppet characters roared back onto the big screen after more than a decade away ...
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“Dinosaur 13” A Middle-of-the-Pack Doc That Could’ve Been So Much Better
Usually, when a mainstream documentary focuses on a subject that's less-than-uplifting, the filmmakers are able to find some angle through which they can put an optimistic stamp on the story. At the very least, they might toss up some title cards with links to...
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Beyond Blaxploitation: The Last Gasp of the Divided Self
In this installment of our series on black film in the '70s, we look at the work of two seminal black filmmakers of the period.
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History of Film: “Persona”
Ingmar Bergman was one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of international art cinema, and his brand—seen as probing, introspective dramas that sought to explore human nature at its barest, even despite the fact that Bergman’s output was quite varied and often t...
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“Very Good Girls” Is A Delicate, Heartfelt Coming-Of-Age Tale
If you've never been a 19-year old girl, to paraphrase The Virgin Suicides, you might not get the gravity of Lilly's (Dakota Fanning) and Gerri's (Elizabeth Olsen) dilemmas in Very Good Girls. But the path these girls are following during their last summer bef...
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Beyond Blaxpoitation: Other Voices, Other Faces
In August, 1965, the Los Angeles neighborhoods of Watts and Compton caught fire. After years of racial tension, segregated housing and police brutality, the largely African American community had rioted. Surviving footage shows flames, rubble, devastation. B...
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The Claire Denis Retrospective
Claire Denis is a woman of few words, so I shall use that as an excuse to introduce this retrospective briefly. Though I have seen all of Denis' features now, it feels to me that we barely know each other, that the more we learn, the more we know we do not kno...
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Documentarians and Their Subjects
Midway through his heart-palpating new Roger Ebert chronicle Life Itself, director Steve James ‘fesses up to a slight documentarian’s faux pas. In a voice-over narration, James notes that he and Ebert enjoyed a friendly relationship prior to the start of produ...
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“Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” A Socially Conscious But Slightly Trivial Blockbuster
Following Tim Burton’s widely disliked 2001 remake of the original Planet of the Apes (1968), no one really expected much from Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 addition to the franchise, titled Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Yet, to almost consensual delight, Wyatt’s film...
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Black Faces, White Hoods: Blaxpoitation, Meta Narratives and the KKK
At first glance, the image is ironically funny. There’s a gun toting OJ Simpson, decked out in the robes of the Ku Klux Klan, taking aim at an anonymous redneck. Given OJ’s eventual fame, it’s impossible to separate the image from its context. It’s also the...
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