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Crazy from the Heart
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Doctor
: :William Hurt is perfectly cast as an arrogant surgeon who treats patients like interchangeable cogs in the machinery of his medical practice. Then he is diagnosed with throat cancer and, as the title of the memoir on which it is based tells us, he gets a taste of his own medicine. The subplot involves the solidarity between doctors, which is shattered when the newly conscious physician discovers that one of his partners (Mandy Patinkin) is trying to cover up a case of malpractice. Hurt is solid, as is Wendy Crewson as ...
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Housekeeping
: :This sad and quirky movie by Bill Forsyth (Local Hero), set in the 1950s, is a faithful adaptation of Marilynne Robinson's luminous book. Two orphaned girls (newcomers Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) fall in love with their happy-go-lucky Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti) when she comes to live with them. However, the girls discover their quintessentially eccentric aunt is more crazy than idiosyncratic. She has a lifetime supply of newspapers and tin cans, and she doesn't like to turn the lights on in the house. As all crazy aunts are likely to ...
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Leaving Normal
: :This sad and quirky movie by Bill Forsyth (Local Hero), set in the 1950s, is a faithful adaptation of Marilynne Robinson's luminous book. Two orphaned girls (newcomers Sara Walker and Andrea Burchill) fall in love with their happy-go-lucky Aunt Sylvie (Christine Lahti) when she comes to live with them. However, the girls discover their quintessentially eccentric aunt is more crazy than idiosyncratic. She has a lifetime supply of newspapers and tin cans, and she doesn't like to turn the lights on in the house. As all crazy aunts are likely to ...
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Hope (1997)
:Description:Coming-of-age period drama involving a young tomboy who challenges her small, segregation-era southern town to confront bitter truths after her black playmate dies in a fire at the movie house run by her bigoted uncle.
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Stacking
:Description:Coming-of-age period drama involving a young tomboy who challenges her small, segregation-era southern town to confront bitter truths after her black playmate dies in a fire at the movie house run by her bigoted uncle.
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Knightriders
: :After years of dominating the midnight circuit with the likes of Night of the Living Dead, Martin, and Dawn of the Dead, George A. Romero took a departure from bona fide horror films to make this naturalistic tale of a traveling troupe of motorcycle-riding jousters. (Think Hell's Angels on Wheels goes to the Renaissance Faire.) While this may sound ludicrous on the surface, the film emerges as a powerful character study. When the success of their jousting tournaments--in which armor-clad bikers go at each other with real lances for the entertainment of ...
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Executioner's Song
: : Although Gary Gilmore had a pitiful life, it was enough of an American story gone bad to give Normal Mailer a platform for a grand, strange, utterly compelling book: The Executioner's Song, published in 1979. Mailer's literary collaborator, Lawrence Schiller, made the book into a TV-movie (with Mailer scripting), a landmark for its frankness and the general excellence of its acting. Gilmore is brought to vivid life by Tommy Lee Jones, who electrified audiences with his insightful work (this, coming shortly after Coal Miner's Daughter, was one of the roles ...
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And Justice for All
: essential video:Al Pacino plays a Maryland lawyer who takes on a judicial system rife with dealmaking in this awkward blend of satire and sentimentality. Topical director Norman Jewison can't seem to help Pacino get comfortable with the mismatched material, which pushes the film into outrageousness at some turns and mawkishness at others. The script by Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin is more an accumulation of random ideas and moments than a congruent story. However, it's interesting to see the large cast of good actors, most of whom hadn't become well ...
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Swing Shift
: essential video:Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell got together on Swing Shift--and if that's the main reason people know about this movie, it only has itself to blame. The film has a marvelous subject (women's changing status on the home front during World War II), a hugely attractive cast, and a sympathetic director, Jonathan Demme, whose previous film, Melvin and Howard, had been a splendid piece of Americana. Yet despite this, it feels disjointed. Goldie goes to work at a factory when her husband (Ed Harris) goes off to war; Russell ...
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