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Gilda
: essential video:All film noirs need deceit, betrayal, dialogue hard as diamonds--and dames even harder than that. But Gilda is the only one with the dame front and center, and for good reason. Rita Hayworth shimmers in the 1946 classic, which spins on a tortured plot involving the title character (Hayworth); her imperious husband (George Macready), a ruthless casino owner and head of an Argentine tungsten cartel (!); and Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), Gilda's ex-lover and now her husband's go-fer. But no one watches Gilda ...
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The Rounders
: :Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, 'ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived.' Somehow they always end up ...
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Philadelphia
: essential video:Philadelphia wasn't the first movie about AIDS (it followed such worthy independent films as Parting Glances and Longtime Companion), but it was the first Hollywood studio picture to take AIDS as its primary subject. In that sense, Philadelphia is a historically important film. As such, it's worth remembering that director Jonathan Demme (Melvin and Howard, Something Wild, The Silence of the Lambs) wasn't interested in preaching to the converted; he set out to make a film that would connect with a mainstream audience. ...
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Superman the Movie
: essential video:Richard Donner's 1978 epic about the Man of Steel showed how a film about a superhero could be a moving and romantic experience even for people who long ago gave up comic books. Beginning on the icy planet Krypton, the story follows the baby Kal-El, whose rocket ship lands in Smallville, Kansas. He is found there by a childless couple and raised as the shy Clark Kent (the young Kent is played by Jeff East). The film is perhaps most touching in these ...
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Gazebo
: essential video:Richard Donner's 1978 epic about the Man of Steel showed how a film about a superhero could be a moving and romantic experience even for people who long ago gave up comic books. Beginning on the icy planet Krypton, the story follows the baby Kal-El, whose rocket ship lands in Smallville, Kansas. He is found there by a childless couple and raised as the shy Clark Kent (the young Kent is played by Jeff East). The film is perhaps most touching in these ...
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Dear Heart
:Description:The annual postmasters' convention is the setting for this love story. She is a single woman who never thought she'd be involved in an affair. He is a womanizing salesman who is trying to decide whether or not he wants to be engaged.
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Follow the Sun: The Ben Hogan Story
:Description:The annual postmasters' convention is the setting for this love story. She is a single woman who never thought she'd be involved in an affair. He is a womanizing salesman who is trying to decide whether or not he wants to be engaged.
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A Stolen Life (1946)
:Description:The annual postmasters' convention is the setting for this love story. She is a single woman who never thought she'd be involved in an affair. He is a womanizing salesman who is trying to decide whether or not he wants to be engaged.
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Don't Go Near the Water
:Description:The annual postmasters' convention is the setting for this love story. She is a single woman who never thought she'd be involved in an affair. He is a womanizing salesman who is trying to decide whether or not he wants to be engaged.
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Apocalypse Now Redux
: essential video:In the tradition of such obsessively driven directors as Erich von Stroheim and Werner Herzog, Francis Ford Coppola approached the production of Apocalypse Now as if it were his own epic mission into the heart of darkness. On location in the storm-ravaged Philippines, he quite literally went mad as the project threatened to devour him in a vortex of creative despair, but from this insanity came one of the greatest films ever made. It began as a John Milius screenplay, transposing Joseph Conrad's ...
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