It seems that every year or so Hollywood puts out a lavish period piece chronicling England’s Tudor past. There are enough of these films now that you can stitch them all together and come away with a complete (if completely inaccurate) history of jolly old England.

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Penelope is a modern day romantic fairy tale about a family’s dark secret, an unfortunate curse, a journey of self-discovery and the transformative power of love. Oh, and let’s not forget a dangerous and irresponsible strike on adolescent girls’ already fragile self-esteem.

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In 2002, Fernando Meirelles gave the world the Golden Globe and Academy Award-nominated City of God. His was not the Rio de Janeiro they sell to tourists at travel agencies. It was a poverty-stricken shantytown infested with gangs and shattered by urban warfare. Now, six years later, director Paulo Morelli has created a companion piece [...]

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I was recently accepted as a member of the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association. The WAFCA is comprised of DC-based film critics from television, radio, print and the internet.

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There is a belief among fans of “Star Trek” that each of the even numbered films are consistently first-class while each of the odd numbered films inevitably face lukewarm critical and fan reception. The proof would seem to be irrefutable.
My Academy Award predictions seem to follow a very similar, though reversed, pattern. The odd years [...]

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A lot of high-school rebels have made their mark in film history — the adorable con artist Ferris Bueller, the malcontent Andy Clark, the stoner Jeff Spicoli, the delinquent Jim Stark, the egocentric Max Fischer — however, we’ve never met anyone quite like Charlie Bartlett.

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Michel Gondry’s incandescent imagination is always hypnotic (Sunshine of a Spotless Mind), even when it is nearly indecipherable (The Science of Sleep). Be Kind Rewind, every bit as creative as his earlier films, is also his most funny and endearing.

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A superb trailer does not a superb movie make. Despite what has to be one of the best trailers in recent memory, the film for which it is out stumping does not live up to its heady, testosterone-injected promise. But it’s not entirely Vantage Point’s fault.

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The Signal is the first great cult hit of 2008. While unquestionably not a film for everyone, it is an important treatise on the dark side of technology and will doubtless be discussed in media and cinema studies classes for years to come. While films generally heralded by academia do not normally find wide audience [...]

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Definitely, Maybe is not a romantic comedy, at least not in the traditional, contemporary sense. There is romance and there is comedy, but the funny and uplifting Definitely, Maybe could, perhaps, better be called a romantic drama.

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