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Secret Garden
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Rebecca
: essential video:Rebecca is an ageless, timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor. This was Hitchcock's first American feature, and it garnered the Best Picture statue at the 1941 Academy Awards. In today's films, most twists and surprises are ridiculous or just gratuitous, so it's sobering to look back on this film where every revelation not only shocks, but makes organic sense with the story line. Laurence Olivier is dashing and weak, ...
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Shanghai Express
: essential video:Josef von Sternberg gets really exotic here with Marlene Dietrich and the story of her adventures on a train en route to Shanghai, where she is reunited with a lover who jilted her (Clive Brook). When the train is overtaken by Chinese rebels, Brook is held hostage and the rebel leader (Warner Oland of Charlie Chan fame) takes a liking to Dietrich. The notorious adventurer fiendishly strikes a bargain to save Brook, whom she's never stopped loving. This is one of the most ...
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Heaven Can Wait (1943)
: essential video:Don Ameche, silver haired and aged to classy elegance, tries to explain to the Devil (a deliciously underplayed Laird Cregar) why he should spend the afterlife down below. 'Have you committed any major crimes?' he's asked. 'No, but you might say my life has been one long misdemeanor,' he replies. He then proceeds to tell his life story: romantic misadventure, infidelities, and the one true love of his life, his faithful wife, played by porcelain beauty Gene Tierney. Ernst Lubitsch's first film in ...
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Our Little Girl (Col)
: essential video:Don Ameche, silver haired and aged to classy elegance, tries to explain to the Devil (a deliciously underplayed Laird Cregar) why he should spend the afterlife down below. 'Have you committed any major crimes?' he's asked. 'No, but you might say my life has been one long misdemeanor,' he replies. He then proceeds to tell his life story: romantic misadventure, infidelities, and the one true love of his life, his faithful wife, played by porcelain beauty Gene Tierney. Ernst Lubitsch's first film in ...
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Dead Poet's Society
: essential video:Robin Williams stars as an English teacher who doesn't fit into the conservative prep school where he teaches, but whose charisma and love of poetry inspires several boys to revive a secret society with a bohemian bent. The script is well meaning but a little trite, though director Peter Weir (The Truman Show) adds layers of emotional depth in scenes of conflict between the kids and adults. (A subplot involving one father's terrible pressure on his son--played by Robert Sean Leonard--to drop his ...
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Dead Poets Society
: essential video:Robin Williams stars as an English teacher who doesn't fit into the conservative prep school where he teaches, but whose charisma and love of poetry inspires several boys to revive a secret society with a bohemian bent. The script is well meaning but a little trite, though director Peter Weir (The Truman Show) adds layers of emotional depth in scenes of conflict between the kids and adults. (A subplot involving one father's terrible pressure on his son--played by Robert Sean Leonard--to drop his ...
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Bombshell
: :The whirlwind comedy Bombshell deserves a place in the pantheon next to such screwball cinema classics as Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey. The incomparable 'laughing vamp' Jean Harlow, for whom the term bombshell might well have been coined, scintillates in this ferocious exposé of the Hollywood studio system. Harlow essentially plays herself: a platinum blond sex goddess--here named Lola Burns--who every woman wants to be and every man wants to bed. (The line between fiction and reality is so thin here that Lola ...
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That Hamilton Woman
: :The whirlwind comedy Bombshell deserves a place in the pantheon next to such screwball cinema classics as Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey. The incomparable 'laughing vamp' Jean Harlow, for whom the term bombshell might well have been coined, scintillates in this ferocious exposé of the Hollywood studio system. Harlow essentially plays herself: a platinum blond sex goddess--here named Lola Burns--who every woman wants to be and every man wants to bed. (The line between fiction and reality is so thin here that Lola ...
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Sextette
: :The whirlwind comedy Bombshell deserves a place in the pantheon next to such screwball cinema classics as Bringing Up Baby and My Man Godfrey. The incomparable 'laughing vamp' Jean Harlow, for whom the term bombshell might well have been coined, scintillates in this ferocious exposé of the Hollywood studio system. Harlow essentially plays herself: a platinum blond sex goddess--here named Lola Burns--who every woman wants to be and every man wants to bed. (The line between fiction and reality is so thin here that Lola ...
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