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Last of the Dogmen
: :Despite an irritating, tacked-on voice-over narration that somebody must have thought was necessary to make sense of the story (it wasn't), Last of the Dogmen is actually a very moving and magical film. Tom Berenger plays a Montana bounty hunter who helps an anthropologist (Barbara Hershey) search for the descendants of a Cheyenne tribe who disappeared in the 1870s. What the two find in a remote mountain stretch is an entire community of Cheyenne who have kept themselves cut off ...
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Shy People
:Description:A journalist and her teenage daughter journey to the swamps of the Louisiana bayou to write a story about a long lost branch of their family.
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Beaches
: essential video:Garry Marshall's 1988 drama about a 30-year friendship between two women, one wealthy (Barbara Hershey) and the other (Bette Midler) seeking her fortune in show business, is well written (based on the novel by Iris Rainer Dart) and nicely textured in its contrast between the characters' separate destinies. When Hershey becomes ill with cancer, the film takes a predictably sentimental course, yet Marshall brings out the best in both actresses and catches some very fine drama. The film ...
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Falling Down
: :This film, about a downsized engineer (Michael Douglas) who goes ballistic, triggered a media avalanche of stories about middle-class white rage when it was released in 1993. In fact, it's nothing more than a manipulative, violent melodrama about one geek's meltdown. Douglas, complete with pocket protector, nerd glasses, crewcut, and short-sleeved white shirt, gets stuck in traffic one day near downtown L.A. and proceeds to just walk away from his car--and then lose it emotionally. Everyone he encounters rubs him ...
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Portrait of a Lady
: essential video:Leave it to New Zealand director Jane Campion (The Piano, Angel at My Table) to begin an adaptation of Henry James's great novel (set in the late 1800s) with a group of late-20th-century women from Down Under talking about the importance of a kiss. Like any good film adaptation (and it's a very good one, indeed), this exquisitely framed and mounted Portrait of a Lady is at least as much Campion as it is James. The story of ...
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Last Summer
: :A wonderfully acted film about the experiences of four teenagers vacationing on the beach at Fire Island, Long Island. When tragedy strikes, the four youths are bound together for life by a terrible secret. Academy Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actress--Catherine Burns.
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Dangerous Woman
: :A wonderfully acted film about the experiences of four teenagers vacationing on the beach at Fire Island, Long Island. When tragedy strikes, the four youths are bound together for life by a terrible secret. Academy Award Nominations: Best Supporting Actress--Catherine Burns.
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The Right Stuff
: :Philip Kaufman's intimate epic about the Mercury astronauts (based on Tom Wolfe's book) was one of the most ambitious and spectacularly exciting movies of the 1980s. It surprised almost everybody by not becoming a smash hit. By all rights, the film should have been every bit the success that Apollo 13 would later become; The Right Stuff is not only just as thrilling, but it is also a bigger and better movie. Combining history (both established and revisionist), grand mythmaking ...
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With Six You Get Eggroll
: :After her long and wholesome run as America's Sweetheart, Doris Day quit movies with this well-scrubbed picture. With Six You Get Eggroll--oof, what a title--caught the wave of blended-family comedies, coming just after Yours, Mine and Ours and just before TV's The Brady Bunch. Doris has three sons, and new beau Brian Keith has an 18-year-old daughter (the still-baby-faced Barbara Hershey). It's family-friendly sitcom stuff, with both Day and Keith doing their comfortable, patented thing; when the two of them ...
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Paris Trout
: :Based on a tough and unsparing novel about the nature of racism by Pete Dexter, this TV movie offers strong performances but ultimately can't match the book's power. Dennis Hopper plays Paris Trout, a cruel, angry Southerner who thinks he still lives in the days when white men killed blacks with impunity. So, in pursuit of a debtor, he shoots the man's young sister and mother when they get in his way, assuming the law will forgive him. Instead, modern ...
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