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Who's the Man?
(1993)
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Elvis Mitchell
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As a movie, it's not much, but Who's the Man? rolls into a throwaway cool breeze, becoming a hip-hop version of one of those Hope and Crosby road movies.
Posted Sep 08, 2023
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Lone Star
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Sayles may be the last of the red-hot ideologues, but he's also still the wide-eyed schoolkid who, given one wish, would ask for peace on Earth.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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3/5
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M3GAN
(2022)
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Nicholas Bell
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M3gan may not dream of electric sheep, but she’s got some killer dance moves and a CPU as delightfully wicked as any femme fatale.
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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2/5
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Scream VI
(2023)
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Nicholas Bell
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If Craven’s universe too often overcalculated the niftiness of shrewd self-awareness, this smugness at last begins to feel diluted through the necessity of appealing to a younger generation more accustomed to streaming content...
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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2.5/5
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Renfield
(2023)
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Nicholas Bell
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Any episode of What We Do in the Shadows trumps whatever’s being attempted with either horror or comedy in the flaccid offerings of Renfield.
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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2/5
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White Men Can't Jump
(2023)
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Nicholas Bell
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The worst crime committed by White Men Can’t Jump is how tedious and routine it feels.
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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3/5
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No Hard Feelings
(2023)
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Nicholas Bell
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One of Lawrence’s most interesting characters, her vibrancy blazes beyond the film’s limitations.
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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3/5
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They Cloned Tyrone
(2023)
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Nicholas Bell
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There’s a thread of something quite revolutionary at play in They Cloned Tyrone.
Posted Jul 25, 2023
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Boiler Room
(2000)
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Andy Greenwald
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Boiler Room is consistently on target and fantastically of-the-moment.
Posted Dec 28, 2022
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Liberty Heights
(1999)
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Andy Greenwald
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Liberty Heights is yet another entry in that most Vaseline-smeared of all film genres -- Jewish family learns life lessons in post-WWII America -- but one with a low-key charm.
Posted Dec 28, 2022
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Stigmata
(1999)
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Andy Greenwald
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Masking incoherence with a barrage of stylized images, Wainwright makes a lot of noise and still manages to say nothing.
Posted Dec 28, 2022
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The Pillow Book
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Greenaway makes movies like no other human being, and The Pillow Book is rarely satisfied with a single image. It uses overlapping subframes, trace images, and hieroglyphs, dissolving in and out of view like a picture-in-picture TV screen gone lyrical.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Contempt
(1963)
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Michael Atkinson
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The cumulative impact is achingly, exquisitely sad in ways you never expect. In an airless mediascape where digital effects and post-Gaultier costume design pass for triumphant filmmaking, vintage Godard provides a blast of pure oxygen.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Breaking the Waves
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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There may be no way to prepare for the shock of Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, a film that accumulates moral momentum as it rolls on and bears down on you in its last half hour like a lightning strike.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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The Crucible
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Finally transformed into a chilling and expressive film by Nicholas Hytner, director of The Madness of King George, Miller's script remains a razor-sharp interrogation of religious dread, mob rule, and, most of all, sexual hysteria.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Crash
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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It's a landmark movie, the kind of film that carves out its own exclusive territory in the cultural forebrain and dares us to cross its border.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Message to Love
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Lerner's document is a wizened squint at the tension between hippie idealism and the backstage laws of late capitalism.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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The People vs. Larry Flynt
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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The People vs. Larry Flynt fairly levitates, but when Love's around it takes off.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Georgia
(1995)
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Michael Atkinson
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It's a rare animal: a full- blooded, nutsy movie about family life, where there are no villains, no heroes, and no answers to what are, after all, every family's unanswerable questions.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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12 Monkeys
(1995)
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Michael Atkinson
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The movie contemplates the circularities of time, apocalypse culture, and movies themselves... That shouldn't seem like some kind of pop miracle, but it does.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Walking and Talking
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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You can feel Walking and Taking's honesty in every frame.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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In the Company of Men
(1997)
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Michael Atkinson
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The dark side of Dilbert, Neil LaBute's scabrous In the Company of Men tells us all we ever wanted to know, or rather, all we already knew in our guts, about life on the postindustrial cube farm.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Sunday
(1997)
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Michael Atkinson
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This is a movie where the characters' lies tell us more about them than cold facts, and watching it is like being involved in a subterranean mystery that has no crime and, most likely, no cut-and- dried solution.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Both a chronicle of death and retribution and, as the title suggests, a portrait of the American dream gone gamy.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Jude
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Far from another cuted-up, waistcoat- &-bustle Emma Thompson weekend getaway, Jude is stark, gnarly, and breathtaking.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Bound
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Bound is a snarky, dirty giggle-riff lifted straight from late-night cable.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Kansas City
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Kansas City goes nowhere fast.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Flirt
(1995)
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Michael Atkinson
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By the third replay of the same dialogue, you're significantly less enchanted with the material than Hartley apparently is with himself.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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The Addiction
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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Bloody fun, the film is classic Ferrara -- stomach-churning, infuriating, sublime.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Clockers
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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For all its flash and agitated rhythms, Clockers has the thoughtful down time that allows actors to act and the narrative to hold its course.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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The Usual Suspects
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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Singer has an obvious grasp of craft, but it's far less clear whether he has anything to say about movies, violence, the world, or his place in the world.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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To Die For
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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Furiously paced and sharply funny, To Die For doesn't try for subtlety; its laughs are delivered with self-consciously heavy hands.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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The Brothers McMullen
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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While seriously lacking in polish, Burns's debut has an edge on most of its big-ticket competition thanks to its bright dialogue and a couple of sweet performances, including one by the writer-director himself.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Smoke
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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It's smooth where it should be ragged, soft where it should be tough. And while that makes for charm, it doesn't much make for honesty.
Posted Dec 27, 2022
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Bottle Rocket
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Owen Wilson, with his buzz-blond do, smiling mug, and self-realizing spiel, is truly one of a kind.
Posted Apr 19, 2022
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La Haine
(1995)
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Michael Atkinson
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In your face and proud of it, Hate is an anthem movie sweating with unvented rage.
Posted Apr 19, 2022
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Fargo
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Though Miller's Crossing may be the one Coen movie as poetic as it is absurd, Fargo is the brothers' smartest film and a matter-of-fact masterpiece.
Posted Apr 19, 2022
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Heavy
(1995)
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Michael Atkinson
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Super-real, uncompromised, and blazingly homely, Heavy is a movie covered with honest work blisters -- nothing interests first-time writer/ director James Mangold quite as much as simply watching an ordinary person do their job.
Posted Apr 19, 2022
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All Over Me
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Scrupulously realistic and acutely observed.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Nowhere
(1997)
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Michael Atkinson
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Araki is very skillful at textual stealth attacks, allowing melancholy to emerge from rampaging static, and vice versa.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Kissed
(1996)
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Michael Atkinson
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Doomsaying about independent films... is this year's favorite kvetch, and yet movie hand grenades still manage to get tossed into our laps with astonishing regularity. Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed is a startling example.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Living in Oblivion
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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A ten-minute joke stretched to near exhaustion.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Swimming With Sharks
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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Shot in a cramped and stage-like style, and sounding like warmed- over Mamet, Swimming With Sharks tries to go for the big picture but comes up empty from the first frame to the last.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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River of Grass
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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With an ear for dialogue that burns deep and bright, and an eye for mad detail, Reichardt here proves herself a formidable talent.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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An Awfully Big Adventure
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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A winning period picture.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Postcards From America
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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Based loosely on the writings of New York painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, [it] works less as a realized vision of the late artist than as a potent meditation on the ways childhood intersects with desire, for both the good and the very bad.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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Charming and lighter than air.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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The Perez Family
(1995)
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Manohla Dargis
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Like Dottie herself, the film is all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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Crumb
(1994)
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Manohla Dargis
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By turns hilarious and grim.
Posted Apr 18, 2022
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3/4
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There Will Be Blood
(2007)
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Troy Patterson
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Though Day-Lewis seethes juicily, under the weight of all that allegory, Plainview steadily grows more vicious and less fascinating, wasting away to just a cackle and an empty leer.
Posted Oct 25, 2019
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