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2.5/4
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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
(2023)
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Matt Brunson
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As someone who felt the updated phrase for Jumping the Shark should have been LaBeoufing the Monkeys rather than Nuking the Fridge, I couldn’t help but wince at the late-inning turn of events in a movie without many low points ... or high points, either.
Posted Jul 08, 2023
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3/4
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Bubba Ho-Tep
(2002)
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Matt Brunson
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The most surprising element of this picture isn’t its outrageousness but rather its occasionally wistful, even poignant, approach.
Posted Mar 29, 2023
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American Psycho
(2000)
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Felicia Feaster
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Graced with a smart, pathos-laden meditation on male competition and the blood-drawing ferocity of a money-centered culture, along with screenwriter Guinevere Turner, Harron does a transformative voodoo on an often repugnant source.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Punch-Drunk Love
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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[T]here's very little to hold onto in this lackluster, uninspiring film with the disappointing inertness of a deflated balloon.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Raising Victor Vargas
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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Few films capture how hostile and enormous the world can be for children and the defenses they create to cope, but this easygoing, lovely film does, to great, tender effect.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Ten
(2007)
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Felicia Feaster
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More than simply unentertaining, The Ten comes from an America of silly, laddish self-regard and hollow protest.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Lady Chatterley
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is as exquisite and memorable for the way it burrows beneath its characters' skin, into the discrete and lonely worlds they occupy.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Masked and Anonymous
(2003)
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Felicia Feaster
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Bloated by self-regard, Masked and Anonymous is the essence of the self-aggrandizing benefit concerts it weakly parodies.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Spider
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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Cronenberg's thoroughly creepy and hypnotic film often has the texture of damp wool, his evocation of claustrophobic brooding so intense you can nearly smell the mildew.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Talk to Her
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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Unfortunately, the Spanish enfant terrible's iconoclastic artistic hysteria never rises to the surface in Talk to Her.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Auto Focus
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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For all its tantalizing forays into the narcotic, head-swimming loss of self and perspective in addiction, Auto Focus never quite extends its sympathy to its characters or convinces us that they are real people.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Quiet American
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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The Quiet American is an accurate if not entirely soul-quaking adaptation of Greene's style to film. It establishes such a believable atmosphere of quiet, old-fashioned gentility that when a moment of violence occurs, the carnage is even more devastating.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Frida
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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The strangest of birds - a film about a Communist, bisexual, hirsute, maverick artist aimed squarely at a mainstream audience - Frida may, in fact, turn out to be more radical than it first appears.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Wordplay
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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Diverting though Wordplay may be, when it moves into tournament-mode, the film suffers from the essentially undramatic nature of this solitary "sport."
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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The Twilight Samurai
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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Twilight Samurai contains a powerful pacifist message about a hero free from the supposedly innate male taste for violence.
Posted Feb 04, 2020
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Murderball
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Murderball tends to buck the feel-good vibe and good guy-bad guy arc of that genre... Instead, the film depicts a more profound and lifelong battle waged between these men and the circumstance they find themselves in.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Everything Is Illuminated
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Rather than aiming to please, the film expects a certain patience on the viewer's part as it ambles and slowly shifts from an often forced quirkiness to a bone-deep melancholy. That change of tack proves worth waiting for.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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One Hour Photo
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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While honoring the suspense-building engine of a thriller, One Hour Photo creates a nightmare portrait of American life.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Birth
(2004)
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Felicia Feaster
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Glazer leaves narrative threads dangling and a purposeful ambiguousness that seems less a desire to subvert Hollywood closure as a fey, fancified gesture of presumed depth on the film's part.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Art School Confidential
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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Art School Confidential is as visually uninteresting as it is idea-parched.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Kandahar
(2001)
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Felicia Feaster
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Less interesting as a Westerner's primer on Afghanistan's horrors, the film becomes truly transfixing when it assumes the languid, neorealist style of the Iranian cinema.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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The Namesake
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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[Nair's] film covers so much ground that it's hard to sustain emotional investment in its characters.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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We Don't Live Here Anymore
(2004)
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Felicia Feaster
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[A] ponderously "important" but emotionally hollow analysis of infidelity's cruel undertow.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Pretty Persuasion
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Pretty Persuasion is a slutty little movie pretending to be an important one.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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XX/XY
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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A film about the necessity of growing up could have profited from its own advice.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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The Girl on the Bridge
(1999)
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Felicia Feaster
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Girl on the Bridge is pure, buttery fantasy with all the attendant empty calories.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Old Joy
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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If you succumb to its unique rhythms and let it, Old Joy is a film that will break your heart.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Forty Shades of Blue
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Their script is infused with the romantic highs and lows of a million country songs. But it's the haunting melody, soaked in longing and agony that words can convey only in small part, that really gets you.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
(2004)
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Felicia Feaster
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It's hard to fault Anderson for striving - with clearly considerable effort - to create a film world more complete and satisfying than the real one.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Color Me Kubrick
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Color Me Kubrick is not without its wacky charms principally driven by John Malkovich's contortions as Conway.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Marrying extreme set design and sublime casting... Burton's film showcases his usual interest in gothic effects and the original Willy Wonka's psychedelia.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Sylvia
(2003)
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Felicia Feaster
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When there are so few stories dedicated to female creativity and pathos, you resent this one all the more for mishandling what might have been.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Short Cut to Nirvana: Kumbh Mela
(2004)
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Felicia Feaster
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What is clearly a sacred event to the Indian and non-native participants becomes a crazed, depth-less spectacle of cinematic tourism in the hands of the filmmakers, who drop us into the midst of the fracas with no sense of perspective, insight or voice.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Jesus Camp
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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After the filmmakers' 200th shot of kids weeping at the words of the lord, the message changes from educational to freak show.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Inside Deep Throat
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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[S]o much of the material is served up with a wink and "a giggle," the possibilities for real revelation are scarce.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Town & Country
(2001)
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Felicia Feaster
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A film of low expectations, Town & Country feels like the kind of calculated, lifeless product written by jaded Hollywood hacks in response to what they think middle-America might want.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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Send a Bullet
(2007)
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Felicia Feaster
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[A] bizarre, often riveting film about contemporary Brazil.
Posted Feb 03, 2020
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American Pimp
(1999)
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Felicia Feaster
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American Pimp is for the most part a depressing, crashing bore, full of sanctimonious, money-obsessed predators with taste that would make Minnie Pearl cringe, selling a dirty business as a higher calling.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Oliver Twist
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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Polanski's Oliver Twist is a flawed but harrowing, empathetic view of the world seen through the eyes of its most powerless and invisible citizens.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Knocked Up
(2007)
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Felicia Feaster
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Knocked Up crafts pathos and spit-takes from the truism that life will invariably make adults of us all whether we like it or not.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Delirious
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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Delirious is definitive DiCillo: goofy and cartoonish at the edges, at times a little obvious in its caricature of our celebrity-obsessed culture, but humble and funny enough to compel viewers to overlook its flaws.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Breaking and Entering
(2006)
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Felicia Feaster
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Minghella takes Haneke's gravitas and transforms it into the brand of sorrowful yuppie chow and shallow treatment of alienation favored by angsty Hollywood melodramas such as Crash.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Blue Crush
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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Something just feels right about a girl-power movie in which the football players are the spoiled, clueless ones and the rough-around-the-edges surfer girls look far more world-weary and tough.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Bridget Jones's Diary
(2001)
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Felicia Feaster
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When rendered in visual terms, many of the most delicious qualities of Bridget Jones's Diary also become highly smelly, like a wedge of cheese that's overstayed its welcome.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Wet Hot American Summer
(2001)
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Felicia Feaster
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But like many a "Saturday Night Live" gag, Wet Hot American Summer also can overstay its welcome and drag interminably on, its joke about the longest day in the world backfiring as it moves sputteringly toward a resolution.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Dark Blue
(2002)
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Felicia Feaster
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Dark Blue is a bitter, often stunning sewer elegy for the little-man-as-monster, the nobody who thinks he's somebody but who is just a stooge trapped within a corrupt system.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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Krampack
(2000)
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Felicia Feaster
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A brutally, often uncomfortably frank film about the fierce, intense friendships that develop between teenagers.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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The Clearing
(2004)
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Felicia Feaster
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An evolutionary thriller, The Clearing not only reinforces the status quo, it grinds the face of the economy's losers in the dirt and does a victory dance on their head.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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The Barbarian Invasions
(2003)
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Felicia Feaster
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[A] subtle and scrupulously intelligent film.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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A History of Violence
(2005)
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Felicia Feaster
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[An] intense, thoughtful, morally ambiguous film.
Posted Jan 30, 2020
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