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Yellow Submarine
: essential video:This restored, animated valentine to the Beatles offers viewers the rare chance to see a work that's been substantially improved by its technical facelift, not just supersized with extra footage. Recognizing that its song-studded soundtrack alone makes Yellow Submarine a video annuity, United Artists has lavished a frame-by-frame refurbishment of the original feature, while replacing its original monaural audio tracks with a meticulously reconstructed stereo mix that actually refines legendary original album versions. What emerges is a vivid time ...
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Back to the Future
: :Dr. Emmett Brown: Then tell me, 'future boy,' who is president in the United States in 1985? Marty McFly: Ronald Reagan. Dr. Brown: Ronald Reagan? The actor?! Who's vice president? Jerry Lewis? Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis topped his breakaway hit Romancing the Stone with this joyous comedy with a dazzling hook: what would it be like to meet your parents in their youth? Billed as a special-effects comedy, the imaginative film (the top box-office smash of 1985) has staying power because of ...
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Singing Nun
: essential video:One of the unlikeliest pop stars of the 1960s gets the bio treatment in The Singing Nun, a fictionalized account of the Belgian nun dubbed 'Soeur Sourire' (Sister Smile). The cute tone is regrettable, and it's difficult to adjust to Debbie Reynolds in a habit, but the movie isn't bad for its kind. It's the light version of The Nun's Story, with Hollywood conflicts substituted for spiritual angst. The supporting cast brings in some camp appeal: Agnes Moorehead as ...
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Canterville Ghost (1944)
: essential video:One of the unlikeliest pop stars of the 1960s gets the bio treatment in The Singing Nun, a fictionalized account of the Belgian nun dubbed 'Soeur Sourire' (Sister Smile). The cute tone is regrettable, and it's difficult to adjust to Debbie Reynolds in a habit, but the movie isn't bad for its kind. It's the light version of The Nun's Story, with Hollywood conflicts substituted for spiritual angst. The supporting cast brings in some camp appeal: Agnes Moorehead as ...
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The Long, Long Trailer
: :Success in that newfangled television business prompted Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz to bring their slapstick chemistry to the big screen, courtesy of a 28-foot monster of a trailer home. The Long, Long Trailer is one of those domestic nightmare movies, in which an ordinary couple has their existence upended by a new contraption: in this case, a lemon-yellow motor home. They make the mistake of towing said behemoth to Colorado, a honeymoon journey fraught with tilted axles and Lucy's ill-advised ...
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No Time for Sergeants
: :Andy Griffith burst to stardom with this surprisingly funny film adaptation of the Broadway comedy (by, of all people, Ira Levin of Rosemary's Baby fame). Griffith plays a hillbilly who is drafted into the army where, among other things, he has to wear shoes regularly for the first time. Griffith brings an engaging glee to the role of this likable bumpkin, whose happy-go-lucky demeanor is impervious to insult. Ask him to clean the latrines and he rigs the toilet seats to ...
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Dr Strangelove
: essential video:Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with 'the purity of precious bodily fluids,' mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so-called 'Doomsday Device,' and ...
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Boeing Boeing
: essential video:Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made, Stanley Kubrick's cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and military insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with 'the purity of precious bodily fluids,' mounts his singular campaign against Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so-called 'Doomsday Device,' and ...
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Bringing Up Baby
: essential video:'The love impulse in man,' says a psychiatrist in Bringing Up Baby, 'frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict.' That's for sure. For a primer on the rules and regulations of the classic screwball comedy, which throws love and conflict into close proximity, look no further. A straight-laced paleontologist (Cary Grant) loses a dinosaur bone to a dog belonging to free-spirited heiress Katharine Hepburn. In trying to retrieve said bone, Grant is drawn into the vortex surrounding the delicious ...
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The Quiet Man
: essential video:Blarney and bliss, mixed in equal proportions. John Wayne plays an American boxer who returns to the Emerald Isle, his native land. What he finds there is a fiery prospective spouse (Maureen O'Hara) and a country greener than any Ireland seen before or since--it's no surprise The Quiet Man won an Oscar for cinematography. It also won an Oscar for John Ford's direction, his fourth such award. The film was a deeply personal project for Ford (whose birth name ...
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