1. THERE WILL BE BLOOD: There Will Be Blood, the story of a misanthropic oilman at the turn of the last century, is the sort of film you stumble out of, desperately searching for an adjective that is both descriptive enough to encompass your experience and distinctive enough to convey your stratosphere-bound senses. There [...]

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There Will Be Blood is the sort of film you stumble out of, desperately searching, like a drowning man frantic for air, for an adjective that is both descriptive enough to encompass your experience and distinctive enough to convey your stratosphere-bound senses.
There was but a single word for me: gobsmacked.
There Will Be Blood is a [...]

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After a career which began with such cross-genre classics as This is Spinal Tap, Stand by Me, The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally, director Rob Reiner went on to solidify his reputation with Misery, A Few Good Men and The American President. Rest assured, this lengthy laundry list has a point. Since 1995, [...]

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This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.
If there wasn’t already plenty of documentation to back it up, especially the book of the same name by the late CBS correspondent George Crile, you might have a hard time believing that [...]

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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a dark and terrifying love story, as much a horror film as a musical extravaganza.

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As a rule, I try to stay as far away from Jerry Bruckheimer movies as possible. I’ve learned that he and I don’t exactly see eye to eye. A few notable exceptions are Black Hawk Down, the first Pirates of the Caribbean and perhaps Crimson Tide. I’ll throw Top Gun in there as an oldie [...]

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While eerie and breathtakingly evocative, the solid I Am Legend nevertheless tries to be too many things to too many people, weighed down with cheap horror-film shock effects and barely passable CGI, instead of trusting in its legitimately captivating last-man-on-Earth scenario.

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Pregnancy’s been big at the theater this year. First Waitress, then Knocked Up and now Juno. Believe the hype — this one’s as good as you’ve heard.

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Like Atonement, The Kite Runner is about an author who tries to work through childhood sins and find forgiveness among words on the page. The film, a story of friendship and family, guilt and redemption, is solid and competently made, but then those are words one always uses when a piece of art falls short [...]

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This is an abridged version of a review I wrote for Christianity Today Movies. To read the rest of this review, click here.
On December 8th, 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), the 43-year-old editor of Elle magazine and a wealthy Parisian socialite suffered a massive stroke which decimated his brain stem. When he awoke, almost three [...]

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