B+ |
*** |
+2|
Teens & Up
In
War Horse Spielberg harkens back to an earlier cinematic age, creating something more like a Golden Age Hollywood epic than any film I’ve seen in years, the one other notable example being Baz Luhrmann’s
Australia.
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C- |
** |
-2|
Adults
The life and work of J. Edgar Hoover offers grist for a dozen different movies or more, and Clint Eastwood’s
J. Edgar wants to be all of them at once. It’s the sort of staidly respectable, competently directed biopic that gives a bad name to competently directed biopics, and possibly to respectability.
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B- |
**½ |
+2-2|
Teens & Up*
Based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling 2009 novel,
The Help is largely about the daily humiliations and injustices to which black maids and nannies working in white homes were subject, and the invisibility of these humiliations to their white employers, until, in this fictional account, their stories are told, first in secret and then in public.
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A |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Credibly researched by screenwriter James Solomon and beautifully filmed by Newton Thomas Sigel (
The Usual Suspects,
Three Kings,
Valkryie), it’s a rare historical drama that credibly captures a sense of another era while allowing its characters to breathe and talk and argue like men and women living in the present tense.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up
Xavier Beauvois’ sublime
Of Gods and Men is that almost unheard-of film that you do not judge—it judges you. To one degree or another it defies every attempt to put it in a box, to reduce its challenge to a political or pious ideological stance to be affirmed or critiqued.
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Alejandro Amenábar’s
Agora is a work of hagiography, and, for that matter, of anti-hagiography. Among its burdens are that Hypatia of Alexandria, the celebrated neo-Platonic philosopher and mathematician, is worthy of veneration, and also that Cyril of Alexandria, saint and doctor of the Church, is not. Neither of these theses is without prima facie plausibility, or unworthy of serious-minded and nuanced exploration.
Agora is serious-minded to a fault, but nuance, while not absent, is lacking.
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Exactly 70 years ago today, on March 5, 1940, Josef Stalin and the entire Soviet Politburo signed an order to massacre tens of thousands of Polish prisoners of war: officers, mostly reservists; doctors, academics, civil servants, clergymen of all faiths—the cream of the Polish intelligentsia.
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A+ |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Developed in Rome during the Nazi occupation, shot in the Eternal City shortly after the Nazi withdrawal, Roberto Rossellini’s
Rome Open City stunned audiences the world over who saw in it an unmediated authenticity more evocative of the documentary quality of wartime newsreels than of the artificiality of earlier, more conventional WWII dramas.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
How do you weigh the cultural heritage of a nation against the value of human life? That’s the subtext of
The Train, a wholly persuasive, intelligent thiller crisply directed by John Frankenheimer (
The Manchurian Candidate) with documentary-like realism and emphasis on action and problem-solving.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Kids & Up
Man’s own shadow, as much as the moon’s, lies across
In the Shadow of the Moon, David Sington’s moving documentary of the U.S. Apollo program. An eloquent testament to the grandeur of creation as well as man’s unique place in it,
In the Shadow of the Moon offers a remarkable look at the history and technology of the Apollo program, but an even more extraordinary glimpse of the men who lived it and made it happen.
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B- |
**½ |
+2|
Teens & Up
Where Paul Greengrass’s brilliant
United 93 crafted a documentary-like anatomy of events without presuming to get inside people’s heads or explain actions or motivations,
World Trade Center is a more conventional Hollywood film, with dramatic dialogue, characters following clearly plotted arcs, and a swelling soundtrack to reinforce the mood.
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A |
**** |
+3|
Teens & Up*
Whatever monument is eventually built at Ground Zero or anywhere else,
United 93 is as fitting and worthy a memorial to the victims and heroes of September 11 as one could hope for.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up
Sophie Scholl is one of a very few films that accomplishes one of the rarest and most valuable of cinematic achievements: It makes heroic goodness not just admirable, but attractive and interesting.
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A |
**** |
+0|
Teens & Up
In an age when we rely on computerized directions and GPS devices to drive to the next town, it seems an almost mythic scenario: brilliant men calculating outer-space trajectories on the fly with pencils and slide rules, keeping life and limb together literally with duct tape, flying to the moon and back simply because they could.
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A |
**** |
+2|
Teens & Up
Downbeat, intelligent, and compelling, the film is brilliantly
constructed and acted, bringing lucid, forceful moral
argumentation as well as emotional sympathy to both sides without
tipping its hand until the powerful climax. Tribunal justice Dan
Hayward (Spencer Tracy) is the ideal foil for the film’s
rhetoric: a self-deprecating, folksy American circuit court judge
with no ax to grind and a winsome appreciation for his own
obscurity, knowing he’s sitting in judgment of defendants no one
else wanted to judge.
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For German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff,
the appeal of making
The
Ninth Day, a fact-inspired film about a priest in a Nazi
concentration camp who is briefly released, goes back over five
decades to Schlöndorff’s film-club days at a Jesuit boarding
school, where he first encountered Carl Dreyer’s silent
masterpiece,
The
Passion of Joan of Arc.
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A+ |
**** |
+4|
Teens & Up*
The Ninth Day digs beyond rote charges of ecclesiastical complicity and counter-arguments to explore various levels of resistance and protest — and their consequences.
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A |
***½ |
+3|
Teens & Up
Not in the now-distant mythology of World War II, with the
iconic evil of the Nazi regime pitted against the warriors of the
Greatest Generation, or even the likes of larger-than-life Oskar
Schindler. Here is a horror within living memory of nearly anyone
old enough to watch the film, a holocaust without the cover of a
massive bureaucratic machine or industrialized, sanitized gas
chambers.
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A+ |
**** |
+3|
Adults*
As he first did decades earlier with
Jaws, Spielberg
reaches past our defenses by suggesting rather than showing: he
knows there is as much horror in a mountain of shoes and personal
effects whose owners won’t be needing them again as in a mountain
of bodies. In fact, one of the film’s most ghastly moments is
nothing more than a mere rude gesture from a small child.
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A |
**** |
+1|
Teens & Up
A haunting, harrowing war movie, an emotionally devastating character study, and an extraordinarily restrained example of
animé or Japanese animation,
Grave of the Fireflies is a unique and unforgettable masterpiece.
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