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The best movies of 2024 (so far!)
After last year’s bounty of great cinema, Hollywood observers expected an inevitable letdown for 2024. Now that we are a little more than halfway through the year, those prognostications look accurate. The Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes last year resulted in a significant drop in output. And despite some occasional bright spots (Inside…
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Prince of the City (1981)
Although Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City hit movie theaters in 1981, its deliberate pace, brooding vibe and moral ambivalence place it squarely in line with the director’s string of 1970s-era masterworks that included Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Based on a 1978 nonfiction book by Robert Daley, Prince of the City changes names and times, but it essentially…
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The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989)
When you have real-life brothers portraying brothers, you’re bound to elicit some interesting dynamics. That’s the case with The Fabulous Baker Boys. A modest box-office success upon its 1989 theatrical release, it chiefly earned raves at the time for a memorable star turn by Michelle Pfeiffer. But the movie holds up, thanks to its richly drawn…
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Score!
Bet you didn’t know today, April 3, is National Film Score day. Well, now you do. And no one will ever be able to take that away from you. It’s no secret that music composition is integral to the cinema experience. A great score can make a great picture even better (Oppenheimer, for instance) while…
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A Stanley Kubrick countdown
Stanley Kubrick, arguably the greatest filmmaker of his generation, shuffled off this mortal coil 25 years ago today. He was 70 years old. Only six days earlier, he had given Warner Brothers the final cut of what would be his last motion picture, Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick didn’t make me a cinephile, but he did…
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Romance on the Big Screen
This week we commemorate the 95th anniversary of that fateful day seven members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang were mowed down, deep-dish Chicago style, by four of Al Capone’s Tommy gun-wielding henchmen. Or to put it another way, this Wednesday marks Valentine’s Day. As such, it seems as appropriate a time as any to…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
