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“Smashed” is one of those movies that would sink right into a pile of the year’s misfires if it weren’t for a powerhouse lead performance anchoring it all the way through. The movie follows Kate, a jovial drinker and first-grade teacher, through her exacerbating alcoholism and her struggle to admit
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In the waiting room of Oakland’s Highland Hospital, there is much at stake. Faces loom and hover, and almost always provoke. Some are creased with lines of sorrow, others sag with fatigue, and a few glow with mirth. This amalgam of emotions reflects what we undergo as we watch the
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Year-round, a grim, cold, bleached-out rain finds the holes in the roof of the English farmhouse called Wuthering Heights. Its echoes are so loud and menacing that it almost silences the furtive characters that walk the moors of this latest adaptation of the famous 1847 novel. These characters trudge the
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There are approximately eight people shot in the head, three burned alive, two with slit throats and at least one former Bond girl ruthlessly killed via close-range gunshot to the stomach in writer/director Martin McDonagh’s new film, “Seven Psychopaths.”
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I had never heard someone call the film “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” a comedy until I met its director, Lee Daniels. “We played it at Sundance to an all-white audience … it was a very serious movie for the white world,” he said, “but for the
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When I arrived at the Northside Cafe for my interview with student documentarian Tianzong Jiang, he was already waiting for me. Jiang runs right on time (I’m on Berkeley time). He introduced himself and then waited for me to get a drink before our interview began. If I needed to
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Whether you call it the “high-school” or “teen film” genre, films about angsty outsider kids trying to fit in are about as ubiquitous in cinema as their romcom and dramedy genre counterparts. Maybe their success lies in the way teen films manage to combine the best of their genre competitors
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Nearing the end of 2012 — the rumored moment of the world’s demise — director Rian Johnson is an optimist. He’s made a movie neither about the apocalypse nor a nostalgic period piece but on traveling to the future. “Looper,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the protagonist, Joe, and Bruce Willis
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Midway through Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film “The Master,” the camera frames two men side by side. To the right, we see a casual gentleman. He’s wearing a fitted suit, leaning in elegant repose with a sense of assurance and authority beyond his years. This is Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour
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From surveillance footage to dashboard camera close-ups, writer and director David Ayer gives audiences a 360-degree view of two young Los Angeles Police officers in his cop drama “End of Watch.” Starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Brian Taylor and Michael Pena as his partner Mike Zavala “End of Watch” is an
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