I don’t know if it’s the strength of Fitzgerald’s novel or Luhrman’s good understanding of it, but this is a far better adaptation than I was expecting. In case you weren’t in an American high school, The Great Gatsby follows Nick Carraway (played here by Tobey Maguire), a bond trader moved to New York...
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Most people think of action stars as some kind of larger-than-life testosterone-powered male: Bruce Willis, Jason Statham and Arnold Schwarzenegger all come immediately to mind. But I like it when movies break stereotypes and give us an action star in a much different package. Children can be used for something other than creeping...
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I’m not sure whether the appropriate genre for Pain & Gain is either comedy or thriller, but I am sure that it’s a story that the cosmos made specifically for Michael Bay. There’s bulked-up dudes, strippers, midgets, stereotypical gay guys, Miami, explosions, slow-motion, and cocaine and the ’90s. Mark Wahlberg is Daniel Lugo, a...
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The opening, a long tracking shot that follows motor stuntman “Handsome” Luke Glanton (Ryan Gosling), as he makes his way through the carnival, lighting cigarettes, pushing through the crowd, enterting the appointed tent, fastening his helmet, and buzzing in the cage with two others, is one of the best — and will likely remain...
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It’s Jurassic Park. I still have my toy T-Rex from 1993 — and it still roars! I know pretty much all of Jeff Goldblum’s lines by heart and am working my way through memorizing Wayne Knight’s. I, like many others, am still pissed that Muldoon gets treated the way he does. Jurassic Park was...
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The first time I met Roger was in the Lake Screening Room. I had just moved to Chicago and done a few reviews at the AMC East and on Michigan and the old Kerasote. This was a guy I’d been reading all my life, writing down notes about which “Great Movies” to see, which...
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When I told my girlfriend I was off to review to the new Stephenie Meyer movie and that, having seen one of the Twilight movies, I had low expectations, she responded, “It could be worse. She could have teamed up with Nicholas Sparks.” “Good point!” I said, and then, a half hour into the...
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Despite having a poster that looks as dangerously banal as The Switch, Admission is so charming that it doesn’t need many jokes. The star, of course, is one of the most charming people working today, Tina Fey, who really should play Dorothy Parker some time. Here, however, she’s Portia Nathan, an admissions officer at...
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The film opens with Chris Nicola, a government employee with a passion for cave-diving. During one of his trips exploring the “gypsum giants” of the Ukraine, he discovers a handful of artifacts — a boot, a lantern — that have no business being there. Back in town, he asks the locals if they know...
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Ginger and Rosa is populated with the kind of people you dream of being as a teenager but come to hate once you get a job. That the movie portrays them so accurately is a credit; that it romanticizes them cannot be helped. The director, Sally Potter, may be drawing on nostalgic memory, as...
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