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For Colored Girls: Ntozake Shange Gets Mangled Onscreen
It’s a long, long way from the women’s bar outside Berkeley, Calif., where Ntozake Shange first presented her…
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Jolene: E.L. Doctorows B-List Sexual Picaresque
Just because you co-founded SIFF doesn’t mean you should be directing movies. Back in ’96, Dan Ireland had…
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Fair Game: Sean Penn, Even More Self-Righteous Than Before
Adapted from Valerie Plame and Joseph C. Wilson’s memoirs, the unsurprisingly validating Fair Game begins as a timeline-hopping…
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The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: Part III Can’t End Soon Enough
When we first see bi computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in the final adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s…
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Howl: James Franco Has a Man-Crush on Allen Ginsberg
As suggested by its title, Allen Ginsberg’s game-changing poem Howl is essentially performative—and so is Howl, the Sundance-opening…
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Douchebag: Bros Before Hos
Sam Nussbaum (Andrew Dickler), his Taliban-length beard an extension of his mullah-like self-righteousness about organic produce and bicycling,…
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Inside Job: Welcome to CDO Hell
Charles Ferguson’s follow-up to his Iraq War gut-twister No End in Sight is a documentary that inspires sickening…
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Conviction: Hilary Swank Demands Another Oscar!
After Fox Searchlight’s Amelia spectacularly flamed out last October, the studio’s trying again to grab awards-season honors with…
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I Am Secretly an Important Man: Recalling the Late Local Poet Steven Jesse Bernstein
You worry about a guy who worshipped William S. Burroughs, and Steven Jesse Bernstein clearly made his friends…
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Hereafter: Clint Eastwood Sees Ghosts
Is America’s last cowboy icon prospecting for more Oscar gold? Taking for his map an original screenplay by…
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The Anchorage: Immersion in a Swedish Forest
C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Anchorage uses a narrative structure introduced to more powerful effect 35 years…
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Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould: An Artist Who Foretold DIY
Glenn Gould got the medium wrong, but eventually got the message right. The ground bass running throughout the…
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Nowhere Boy: Listen to the Beatles’ Early Albums Instead
John Lennon’s teen years are the focus of this very clumsy melodrama by Sam Taylor-Wood. Its few virtues—Liverpool…
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Red: At Last, Helen Mirren as International Assassin!
Classiest. Comic. Book. Movie. Ever. Not the best. Not the worst. Just the classiest—Helen Mirren (and Morgan Freeman…
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A Film Unfinished: Deciphering Nazi Propaganda
Does it matter that a young Israeli filmmaker’s imaginative reconstruction of an abandoned Nazi propaganda film about the…
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Stone: Robert De Niro Wakes From His Nap
Robert De Niro’s alarm must have finally gone off—in Stone, the actor seems more awake than he has…
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Seattle Lesbian & Gay Film Festival: Are We Bears or Are We Samanthas?
It’s been argued, persuasively, that the era of the drag queen is over. After Sex and the City,…
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Never Let Me Go: Would You Like to Buy Keira Knightley’s Liver?
Published five years ago, Kazuo Ishiguro’s massively praised Never Let Me Go is set in an alternate universe…
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Enter the Void: Death Is a Trip for Gaspar Noe
A very, very loose and highly symbolic adaptation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Gaspar Noé’s Enter…