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Orlando
: :Breathtaking and practically nondiscursive, Sally Potter's audacious Orlando overcomes some dodgy performances and a narrative structure that could most generously be described as 'loose' to emerge as a haunting, discussion-provoking trans-historical and transsexual drama. Commanded never to age by Queen Elizabeth (played with surprisingly little camp by legendary cross-dresser Quentin Crisp), the title character becomes immortal; we then follow Orlando through 400 years of dreamlike British history. Midway through the film, Orlando changes genders--to Potter's immense credit, the transformation is handled with little fanfare and no explanation. Tilda Swinton, in the ...
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Female Perversions
: :Breathtaking and practically nondiscursive, Sally Potter's audacious Orlando overcomes some dodgy performances and a narrative structure that could most generously be described as 'loose' to emerge as a haunting, discussion-provoking trans-historical and transsexual drama. Commanded never to age by Queen Elizabeth (played with surprisingly little camp by legendary cross-dresser Quentin Crisp), the title character becomes immortal; we then follow Orlando through 400 years of dreamlike British history. Midway through the film, Orlando changes genders--to Potter's immense credit, the transformation is handled with little fanfare and no explanation. Tilda Swinton, in the ...
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The Statement
: :Michael Caine's riveting performance is the best reason to see The Statement, a lopsided thriller with conspicuously noble intentions. In crafting a thematic counterpart to his Oscar®-winning script for The Pianist, screenwriter Ronald Harwood draws from another fact-based story set during World War II, adapting Brian Moore's captivating novel about an official French collaborator named Brossard (Caine) who executed seven Jews in 1944, under the Vichy regime of Nazi-occupied France, and eluded justice for decades thereafter. While a passionate French judge (Tilda Swinton) and army colonel (Jeremy Northam) pursue Brossard in ...
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Love Is the Devil (Unrated)
: :Michael Caine's riveting performance is the best reason to see The Statement, a lopsided thriller with conspicuously noble intentions. In crafting a thematic counterpart to his Oscar®-winning script for The Pianist, screenwriter Ronald Harwood draws from another fact-based story set during World War II, adapting Brian Moore's captivating novel about an official French collaborator named Brossard (Caine) who executed seven Jews in 1944, under the Vichy regime of Nazi-occupied France, and eluded justice for decades thereafter. While a passionate French judge (Tilda Swinton) and army colonel (Jeremy Northam) pursue Brossard in ...
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Garden
:Description:A lyrical, controversial recreation of the story of The Passion, which examines the role of the Church in the persecution of homosexuality.
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The War Zone - Unrated
: :As unflinching and bleak as it is beautiful, Tim Roth's directorial debut, The War Zone, is remarkably accomplished filmmaking. Adapted by Alexander Stuart from his own novel, the film centers on a family that has just moved from London to the wind-swept English seaside during winter. The relative isolation soon reveals an ongoing incestuous relationship between the working-class father (Ray Winstone) and his 17-year-old-daughter, Jessie. The middle-class mother (Tilda Swinton) has just given birth to their third child and desperately avoids knowing the truth, leaving Tom, the younger brother, with the ...
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Adaptation
: :Twisty brilliance from screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze, the team who created Being John Malkovich. Nicolas Cage returns to form with a funny, sad, and sneaky performance as Charlie Kaufman, a self-loathing screenwriter who has been hired to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into a screenplay. Frustrated and infatuated by Orlean's elegant but plotless book (which is largely a rumination on flowers), Kaufman begins to write a screenplay about himself trying to write a screenplay about The Orchid Thief, all the while hounded by his twin brother ...
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Vanilla Sky
: :Vanilla Sky reunites director Cameron Crowe (Jerry Maguire) with über-playboy Tom Cruise, adds another sexy Cruz (Penélope) and Cameron Diaz for good measure, and delivers a wildly entertaining, bizarre venture into erotic science fiction. Adapted near exactly from Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar's 1997 romantic thriller Open Your Eyes, the film follows David Aames (Cruise) as he falls from his graceful Manhattan perch of inordinate wealth, good looks, and newfound love with Sofia (Cruz) because of severe facial disfigurement in a car accident caused by a suicidal ex-lover (Diaz). What at first ...
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Young Adam (Dol)
: :Few movies are as vividly tactile as Young Adam. The way the cold blue light of Scotland envelopes everything--wooden bannisters, rippling water, rough fabric, coal soot caked in human skin, and flesh itself--makes you feel like you could reach out and touch it all. A failed writer named Joe (Ewan McGregor, Big Fish), slumming on a coal barge, finds himself drawn to barge's owner Ella (Tilda Swinton, Orlando, The Deep End), despite the presence of her husband Les (Peter Mullan, My Name is Joe). But Joe's passion is haunted by the ...
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Edward II
:Description:In the sixteenth century, the king of England jeopardizes his reign when he ignores his wife and openly carries on an affair with his male lover.
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