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Ruby in Paradise
: :An uncommon gem of a film, this story of a young woman finding herself is a marvelous sleeper. Ashley Judd (Kiss the Girls) makes her film debut as Ruby, who moves to a Florida beach town and tries as best she can to earn a living. She begins working in a clothing store and starts dating men, but after some hard choices realizes she must first figure out who she is and what she wants out of life before she settles for something less than she deserves. Writer-director Victor Nunez (Ulee's ...
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Twister
: :Twister was a mega-million-dollar blockbuster--helmed by a director (Dutchman Jan de Bont) hot off another scorcher hit (Speed)--that flaunted state-of-the-art digital effects and featured a popular leading actress (Helen Hunt) who would win an Academy Award for her next film (As Good As It Gets). But ask anybody who's seen it and they'll tell you who the real star of Twister is: the cow. Not to give anything away, but the cow is one of those inspired little touches (like, say, Bronson Pinchot's career-making cameo in Beverly Hills Cop) that adds ...
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Friday the 13th 5
: :Twister was a mega-million-dollar blockbuster--helmed by a director (Dutchman Jan de Bont) hot off another scorcher hit (Speed)--that flaunted state-of-the-art digital effects and featured a popular leading actress (Helen Hunt) who would win an Academy Award for her next film (As Good As It Gets). But ask anybody who's seen it and they'll tell you who the real star of Twister is: the cow. Not to give anything away, but the cow is one of those inspired little touches (like, say, Bronson Pinchot's career-making cameo in Beverly Hills Cop) that adds ...
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Eyes Wide Shut
: essential video:It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture, changed it, 'fixed' it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all, ...
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Eyes Wide Shut
: essential video:It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture, changed it, 'fixed' it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all, ...
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Eyes Wide Shut
: essential video:It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture, changed it, 'fixed' it. We'll never know. But even without the haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all, ...
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Frank & Jesse (Sp)
: :The story of Jesse and Frank James, the real-life robbers whose exploits earned them a Robin Hood reputation, has been portrayed in dozens of films more faithful to the myth than the history. Only in the revisionist 1970s did the romantic shadings come off in a few genre-busting examples (notably The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and The Long Riders). Oddly enough, this 1996 feature takes more than a few factual liberties to restore the romantic portrait of the bank-robbing brothers. Four years after the Civil War, in a South crawling with ...
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Eye of the Eagle 2
: :The story of Jesse and Frank James, the real-life robbers whose exploits earned them a Robin Hood reputation, has been portrayed in dozens of films more faithful to the myth than the history. Only in the revisionist 1970s did the romantic shadings come off in a few genre-busting examples (notably The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and The Long Riders). Oddly enough, this 1996 feature takes more than a few factual liberties to restore the romantic portrait of the bank-robbing brothers. Four years after the Civil War, in a South crawling with ...
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Stranger Than Fiction (1999)
: :A group of best buddies prepare themselves to dispose of a cop's naked corpse that just happens to be resting on the floor of nice guy Mackenzie Astin's (Jared Roth) apartment. Accident? Murder? Something even more sinister? It hardly matters as the cover-up only leads to more dead bodies, driving trust-fund idiot Natasha Gregson Wagner (far too convincing as a blathering bubblehead) completely loony: she starts lining up future victims with the enthusiasm of an assassin in training. That's just the first act of this darkly comic tale of murder and ...
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The Haunting
: :Suffering from the extreme bad luck of being released at the same time as the low-budget The Blair Witch Project, this adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House attempts to update Shirley Jackson's psychologically terrifying ghost story to the era of big-budget, computerized special effects. Does it work? Well, let's just say that showing isn't exactly the same as telling. A prime example of bloated studio filmmaking, The Haunting telegraphs all its frights so blatantly that it forsakes any of Jackson's subtle horrors for the remedial scares of a clunky carnival ...
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