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9: Animated Puppets Survive the Apocalypse
Early in Shane Acker’s computer-animated debut feature 9, a diminutive anthropomorphic whatsit with wooden hands, copper fingers, and…
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PICK District 9: E.T. Goes to Guantánamo
The aliens have been with us for 20 years already at the start of South African director Neill…
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PICK Not Quite Hollywood: Exploitation in Oz
At the same moment that directors like Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong were earning festival kudos and critical…
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Funny People: Apatow and Sandler Confront Middle Age
After canvassing the getting of manly wisdom in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and childbirth in Knocked Up, Judd Apatow…
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The Girl From Monaco: Crime and Farce in the South of France
There’s not much to this thin, sun-drenched concoction about a straight-arrow Paris lawyer (Fabrice Luchini) who descends on…
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PICK Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Six Is Not Enough
Don’t let the PG rating fool you: The dark arts are back with a vengeance in Harry Potter…
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PICK Kabei: Our Mother: Family Drama From Japan
An unpretentious and old-fashioned (that is, crisply legible) domestic drama, Kabei shows how Rising Sun Japan’s sense of…
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Adoration: Atom Egoyan Is Still Smart, Confounding
Atom Egoyan’s 12th feature film offers a typically kaleidoscopic rumination on voyeurism, videography, the relative nature of truth,…
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PICK OHorten: An Endearing Oddball From Norway
The premise of this gentle existential farce from Norwegian director Bent Hamer is little more than an excuse…
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Away We Go: Dave Eggers Movie Not a Work of Staggering Genius
The first original screenplay by hipster lit-world phenom Dave Eggers is, much like his 2001 memoir A Heartbreaking…
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My Life in Ruins: Why Does Nia Vardalos Hate Greece?
Substitute “career” for “life” in the title of this stillborn travelogue comedy, and you’ll have a succinct verdict…
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PICK Outrage: Gays in the Republican Closet? Were Shocked!
Director Kirby Dick doesn’t actually stick his camera under any Capitol Hill bathroom stalls in this new documentary,…
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PICK Tyson: Iron Mike Shows Hes Human.
Director James Toback’s documentary about former heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson isn’t a traditional nonfiction portrait so much…
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Lymelife: Alec Baldwin Travels Back to the 1970s
There’s nothing new under the suburban sun (save for infectious ticks) in Derick Martini’s Lymelife, whose weighty allegorical…
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24 City: China Can’t Keep Pace With Its Own Development
Further confirmation of China’s Jia Zhangke as the planet’s most excitingly original filmmaker, this latest message-in-a-bottle from the…
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17 Again: Zac Efron Goes Cougar Hunting
The fact that chaste, metrosexual teen idol Zac Efron has been allowed to grow a phallus for his…
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Sin Nombre: Bad News From Honduras
Before setting pen to paper, Sin Nombre writer-director Cary Joji Fukunaga purportedly rode the rails in the company…
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PICK The Black Balloon: Fresh Tidings From Oz
Produced for what was likely a day’s Botox budget on Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, this auspicious Oz import—the debut…
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PICK Adventureland: The 80s Rule!
Drawn from Superbad director Greg Mottola’s own experiences working at a ramshackle suburban amusement park in the 1980s,…
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PICK Tokyo Sonata: The Economy Sucks in Japan, Too
Like a bottled message cast from the shores of an economy whose implosion precipitated our own, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s…