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2/4
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The Naked Gun
(2025)
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Dann Gire
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Sprinkles a few laugh-worthy moments over a hodgepodge of bits struggling to be worthy of the original films
Posted Aug 08, 2025
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2.5/4
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Dangerous Animals
(2025)
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Dann Gire
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The dumbness is in the details when screenwriter Nick Lepard sacrifices “Jaws”-level realism by succumbing to B-movie contrivances.
Posted Jun 05, 2025
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3.5/4
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Bring Her Back
(2025)
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Dann Gire
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This movie belongs to Hawkins, who creates a multilayered villain simultaneously abhorrent, yet curiously sympathetic.
Posted Jun 02, 2025
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3/4
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The Surfer
(2024)
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Dann Gire
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The Surfer cannily sidesteps into a blackest of comedies centered around toxic maleness, herd-mentality branding rituals, a man’s midlife crisis, and how easy an individual can be broken down and reassembled to fit in with a local male-centric cult.
Posted May 01, 2025
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4/4
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Sinners
(2025)
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Dann Gire
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A bold reinvention of the horror genre, a truly frightening experience that unleashes the disturbing dark power of the blues, blends it with old-fashioned, Christianity-based vampire lore, all designed to warn us about the seductive appeal of evil.
Posted Apr 18, 2025
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3/4
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Death of a Unicorn
(2025)
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Dann Gire
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“Death” delivers a timely expose of the semantic tactics of control and disinformation sowed by the hilariously clueless and unabashedly selfish rich elite.
Posted Apr 01, 2025
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3/4
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Novocaine
(2025)
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Dann Gire
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The cheerfully violent, stunt-stuffed Novocaine sets its entertainment sights fairly low, then wildly exceeds them for most of its brisk and bloody running time.
Posted Mar 14, 2025
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2.5/4
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Mickey 17
(2025)
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Dann Gire
|
The disappointing “Mickey 17” radiates comic potential, but settles for amused guffaws when it wants to go for hard, gasping laughs of the sort inspired by the disturbingly insightful and shocking elements in Ho’s Oscar-winning Best Picture “Parasite.”
Posted Mar 07, 2025
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2.5/4
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The Monkey
(2025)
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Dann Gire
|
The Monkey, based on King’s 1980 short story of the same title, fails to terrify us. It barely scares us. But man, oh man, does it ever gross us out.
Posted Feb 24, 2025
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2/4
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Presence
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
Hey, it’s a ghost movie. And one that might make Chekhov turn over in his grave.
Posted Jan 24, 2025
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1.5/4
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Wolf Man
(2025)
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Dann Gire
|
“Wolf Man” is a severe disappointment, especially because Whannell wrote and directed Elizabeth Moss’ 2020 vehicle “The Invislble Man,” a smart and surprising update of Universal’s classic 1933 thriller.
Posted Jan 16, 2025
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4/4
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The Brutalist
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
A true epic clocking in at 3 hours and 35 minutes, The Brutalist deserves to be experienced on a big screen where Corbet constantly throws big ideas all over a big painterly canvas like a crazed, cinematic Jackson Pollock.
Posted Jan 10, 2025
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2.5/4
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Nightbitch
(2024)
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Dann Gire
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Fortunately, Adams twists her dialogue with just enough humor to make Mother’s most accurately depressive thoughts curiously amusing -- all while reinventing herself as a model of dogged determination.
Posted Dec 06, 2024
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1.5/4
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Gladiator II
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
There’s no slack to the yak in this dramatically turgid and inadvertently comical miscalculation, easily the dumbest, detail-challenged sword-and-sandal release of the century so far.
Posted Nov 22, 2024
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4/4
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Wicked
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Radiant with combustible chemistry, Grande and Erivo play off each other with the testy flair of Olympic-class fencers.
Posted Nov 22, 2024
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3.5/4
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A Real Pain
(2024)
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Dann Gire
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This compact 89-minute relationship study works with an almost nonexistent plot, and with sharply drawn, realistic characters brought to life by a sublime cast. And it never quite goes where you think it will.
Posted Nov 15, 2024
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3/4
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Heretic
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
Heretic works as a study in obsession, executed by a pitch-perfect Grant peeling off never-ending layers of villainy like a human onion. But Thatcher and East rise up to be equal matches for him as two worthy and resistant foils.
Posted Nov 08, 2024
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2/4
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Here
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
A conceptually daring but tiresome gimmick movie, a virtually plotless, visually busy anthology of nonintersecting stories spanning zillions of years, and we feel as if we’ve sat through most of them.
Posted Nov 02, 2024
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3.5/4
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Conclave
(2024)
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Dann Gire
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Conclave is a rare find at local theaters, political intrigue merged with a thinking viewer's thriller slowly unfolding like a classic murder mystery, but without a Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot.
Posted Oct 25, 2024
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3/4
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Monster Summer
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
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Larry Blanford's impressively strong wide-screen camera work elevates a perfunctory screenplay...
Posted Oct 19, 2024
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3/4
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Smile 2
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
Smile 2 messes massively with our perceptions of reality. It constantly keeps us off-kilter, employing sneaky twists and a brutal barrage of mind-bending point-of-view perspectives...
Posted Oct 19, 2024
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2/4
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The Outrun
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
In the more literal realm of movies, they feel poetically pretentious and add considerable weight to a heavy drama already testing its characters’ welcome...
Posted Oct 04, 2024
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3/4
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Megalopolis
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Francis Ford Coppola poured four decades of frustration, compromise, stress and hope into every frame of Megalopolis. The result is a joyous, artistic mess...
Posted Sep 30, 2024
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3/4
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Speak No Evil
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
Don't underestimate the film's timely moral to the story — a chilling reminder of what happens when good people fail to set and enforce boundaries for acceptable behavior.
Posted Sep 18, 2024
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4/4
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The Substance
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
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Guaranteed to shock, amaze and repulse...
Posted Sep 18, 2024
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2.5/4
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice invests an inordinate amount of time setting up the characters and situations. Keaton doesn't bring the demonic fire and bombast until almost an hour into the story...
Posted Sep 04, 2024
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3/4
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Alien: Romulus
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
20th Century Studios execs did it right. Once they realized Alvarez's film contains Oscar-caliber practical effects, production designs, sound and score, they wisely released Alien: Romulus in theaters, rather than on Hulu as originally announced.
Posted Aug 17, 2024
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3/4
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Twisters
(2024)
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Dann Gire
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Chung wisely prevents the tornadoes — some rendered in utterly terrifying realistic detail, accompanied by immersive sound designs — from eclipsing his more human elements.
Posted Aug 07, 2024
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2.5/4
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MaXXXine
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Mostly, witness another commanding Jennifer Jason Leigh-level performance from the amazing Mia Goth. She kills it.
Posted Jul 03, 2024
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3/4
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Tuesday
(2023)
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Dann Gire
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Pusić concentrates on emotional elements to trump logic and plausibility, resulting in a work of such intriguing imagination, courage and confidence that “Tuesday” inspires us to await her next movie with giddy anticipation.
Posted Jun 13, 2024
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1.5/4
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The Strangers: Chapter 1
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
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Blunted by horror clichés and dumbness...
Posted Jun 04, 2024
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3.5/4
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
(2024)
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Dann Gire
|
Furiosa traffics in pessimism and cruelty. It delivers a bleak and blunt commentary on the inevitability of war and suffering, pointing out humanity's propensity for justifying self-extinction, be it religion, oil, water, revenge or empire.
Posted Jun 04, 2024
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0.5/4
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In a Violent Nature
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
But hey, Pierce Derks' striking camerawork looks downright pretty. That's worth a generous half-star for sure.
Posted Jun 04, 2024
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2/4
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Civil War
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Armed with a timely premise, a high-caliber cast and forceful visuals, Alex Garland’s dystopian horror war road movie Civil War blunts its potential impact by posing unanswered questions and by disregarding pesky, relevant details.
Posted Apr 20, 2024
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2.5/4
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The First Omen
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Better than "Nun"...a watchable, sometimes silly political allegory...
Posted Apr 05, 2024
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3.5/4
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Wicked Little Letters
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
Thea Sharrock’s bawdy Wicked Little Letters, brilliantly tells the fact-based story of a friendship gone sour and an epidemic of poison-pen letters that became a public scandal in a quiet English village during the 1920s.
Posted Apr 05, 2024
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2/4
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Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Godzilla reverts to a less scary, pinker version...
Posted Apr 05, 2024
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2/4
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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
A no-Gozer...
Posted Mar 22, 2024
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2/4
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Arthur the King
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
This could well be the blabbiest sports movie I have seen. It’s as if the filmmakers feared 30 seconds might pass without someone talking, talking, talking.
Posted Mar 17, 2024
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1.5/4
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Madame Web
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
Nonetheless, a lot of effort and $80 million went into creating the most flamboyant product placement ever designed for a soft drink.
Posted Mar 02, 2024
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2.5/4
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Anyone But You
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
Sweeney steeps her sentences in sassy sauce while crossing sharpened verbal swords with Powell, never pandering to the camera or trying too hard to court our favor. She carries this film with charm and polished aplomb
Posted Feb 27, 2024
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Night Swim
(2024)
|
Dann Gire
|
A tepid disappointment...
Posted Jan 19, 2024
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2.5/4
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Napoleon
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
But the battles give us more spectacle than thrills, more action than suspense, leaving Kirby's charismatic, finely layered performance as the film's strongest asset. Kubrick would probably approve of her. After 116 takes...
Posted Nov 28, 2023
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2/4
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Wish
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
Do not Wish upon this star-crossed Disney animated musical.
Posted Nov 28, 2023
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3.5
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Alien
(1979)
|
Dann Gire
|
For all that Alien is -- science fiction, horror story, suspense tale, mystery -- above everything else it is a welcome throwback to the good old-fashioned monster movies of the 1950s.
Posted Nov 16, 2023
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3.5/4
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Common Ground
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
Common Ground tackles the unholy alliance of "big farma" chemical companies and Congress, so that lobbyists and political contributions make stock prices more important than American lives and health.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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4/4
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Priscilla
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
Few Hollywood biographical dramas pack the risky level of exploitative and sensationalistic naughtiness nimbly negotiated in Priscilla.
Posted Nov 03, 2023
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1/4
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Five Nights at Freddy's
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
An intriguing premise undermined by simply terrible storytelling...
Posted Nov 03, 2023
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3.5/4
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
Epic themes. Epic settings. Epic camera work. Epic ending.
Posted Oct 18, 2023
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2/4
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The Creator
(2023)
|
Dann Gire
|
The best visual joke in The Creator? The subtle suggestion that AI humanoids might actually be smarter than humans. Even with literal holes in their heads.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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