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Crazy Love (2007)
Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Boy loses girl. Girl meets someone else. Boy commits despicable act of spite and jealousy. Boy resolves to win girl back … once he serves out his prison sentence, that is. The riveting documentary Crazy Love packs all the thrills, poignancy and dark humor of the most enthralling work…
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Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Breaking up is hard to do, as an old song once cautioned us, but that’s hardly a newsflash for anyone who has endured the agony of being dumped. Untold millions of books, movies and songs have commemorated the hell of being kicked to the proverbial curb and the subsequent tears, depression, drinking, vomiting, rebound, stalking…
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Chloe (2009)
Chloe wants to be an erotic thriller. At least, that’s what I think it aims to be. It’s difficult to know for sure, what with its eroticism steeped in so much fussy pretensions. The movie is particularly disappointing coming from Atom Egoyan, the director behind the critically acclaimed Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997).…
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Daughters of the Sexual Revolution: The Untold Story of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (2018)
Inspiration can come in many guises. According to legend, the genesis of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders stemmed from a 1967 football game at the Cotton Bowl when Cowboys general manager Tex Schramm spotted a local stripper, Bubbles Cash, as she ambled down a staircase wearing a miniskirt and holding two spindles of cotton candy as…
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Sin Nombre (2009)
The directorial debut of Cary Joji Fukunaga, Sin Nombre, is an early demonstration of the filmmaker’s gifts, revealing a lyricism and visual style that elevate the material well beyond melodrama. The Spanish-language film interweaves the stories of two young people who eventually cross paths. In Chiapas, Mexico, Casper (Edgar Flores) is not your typical hood.…
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Heathers (1988)
If you can handle teen suicide as suitable subject matter for the blackest of black comedies, here’s a movie for you. As the flip (and dark) side of John Hughes‘ ‘80s-era youth-centric flicks, Heathers draws blood knifing through the unforgiving social hierarchies of high school. It imagines how tensions between popular kids and pariahs can…
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Gonzo (2008)
Print journalists don’t typically receive rock star status, but Hunter S. Thompson was far from a typical journalist. A booming, pill-popping gun nut with a wit that could cut glass, the not-so-good “doctor” practically invented gonzo journalism with subversive classics such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign…
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Missing (2023)
As gimmicks go, Missing has a mildly intriguing one. The mystery-thriller unfolds entirely on screens of computers, cellphones and smartwatches. If you happened to see the 2018 thriller Searching, then you know the shtick: amateur sleuth investigates a mystery through the trappings of the internet, social media and the like. In fact, Searching‘s editors, Nicholas D. Johnson and…
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach
Let’s talk about movies.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 