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GERALD PEARY
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Standouts
One film stands out among the Animated Shorts, Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby's Wild Life .
The Oscar nominees for Live Action Shorts come down to five conventional narratives.
The Oscar nominees for Live Action Shorts come down to five conventional narratives.
Gender identity crisis
Lesbianism doesn't exist as a cogent category in 19th century Ireland, which could explain why Albert Nobbs (Glenn Close), a woman disguised for years as a man and employed as a Dublin waiter, has no personal understanding of who she is, her identity, or what she feels.
Magic realism and Chekhovian melancholy
This is probably the only film we'll encounter about the Merja culture of West Central Russia, a Finno-Ugric tribe in which even the most modernized people pay allegiance to ancient customs.
The real-life story of a young marine
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Hell and Back Again offers a potent documentary correlative to the narrative of The Hurt Locker .
A veritable, old-fashioned story
War Horse is corny, sentimental, overlong, but also spectacular at times, even stirring.
Xavier Durringer's recreation of the rise of Sarkozy
Xavier Durringer's dramatized recreation of the rise of France's Nicolas Sarkozy to the presidency is generally fair-minded and ambiguous.
Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 opus
Among the world's masterpieces of misanthropy, Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 opus follows a loathsome, greedy, sexually perverse bourgeois married couple on a weekend jaunt into the French countryside during which they plan to murder the wife's dying father, and then, perhaps, turn viciously on each other.
Mediocre black comedy
Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are only faintly humorous as the titular team of assassins, Burke and Hare .
Céline Sciamma's lovely feature
In this lovely feature from the French filmmaker Céline Sciamma, Laure, a 10-year-old tomboy decides after moving into a new neighborhood, to pretend that she's a boy, Mikael, as a way to fit in with the local kids.
Panorama of black-humor stories
The ironically titled film refers to the dreadful Alice-in-Wonderland years when Nicolae Ceausescu was the Communist strongman of Romania.
John Turturro tours his beloved city for this documentary
Charles Aznavour and Édith Piaf, move over!
Carl Colby documents his father's life
"My father lived in shadows," says filmmaker Carl Colby in voiceover. "He liked being invisible." His documentary is a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to understand William Colby, the ex-CIA head who died in 1996.
The original devil-may-care rebels enforce bedtime
Filmmaker Andrea Blaugrund Nevins spent intimate time on the road and at home with some prominent male punk rockers.
DiCaprio as right-wing hero J. Edgar Hoover
Filmmaker Clint Eastwood, famously Republican, portrays right-wing hero J. Edgar Hoover, the late FBI head, as a self-aggrandizing, conniving bully and mama's boy who broke the law whenever he wanted to bring anyone down.
Completely predictable
Those sent to Australia were promised "oranges and sunshine," but were victimized, often sexually, in dreadful orphanages.
Conceptually confusing
Clever CGI allows the effective recreation of a 16th century Flanders.
Gay-themed drama
This appealing gay-themed drama, written and directed with intelligence by Andrew Haigh, is a British cousin to the American mumblecore movement, as two twentysomething guys meet, have sex, talk, have more sex, have much more chat, and get closer and closer over a long weekend.
Hello, Camden!
We've all had that irritating waitress who, asked what she'd suggest on the menu, answers cheerily, "Everything is great!" Thanks for the help — and what credibility!
A collage of privileged documentary moments
In the era when the Black Panther Party was its most powerful and off-the-pig-threatening and separatist, there was little interest in even conversing with whitey, unless whitey was from somewhere other than the ultra-racist USA.
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