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The Strangler
(1970)
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Elissa Suh
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Paul Vecchiali’s uniquely eccentric anti-giallo reshapes a serial-killer movie into a considered portrait of collective loneliness.
Posted Nov 15, 2023
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Here
(2023)
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Elissa Suh
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Unassuming in scope but with far-reaching implications, Bas Devos’s Here (2023) uncovers meaningful connections between two disparate individuals and the worlds they occupy.
Posted Oct 10, 2023
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Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
(2023)
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Saffron Maeve
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There’s a sophistication and assuredness which thins out in the second and third acts; as Thiện leans closer to his faith, he seems to pull away from, rather than expose himself to, the audience.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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In Our Day
(2023)
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Elissa Suh
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If In Water feels slight, its weight is substantially amplified when viewed in conjunction with In Our Day. Across both films, characters search for fulfillment, plumbing the depths of creative devotion.
Posted Oct 02, 2023
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In Water
(2023)
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Elissa Suh
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In <i>The Novelist’s Film</i>, Hong took interest in how the rhythms of daily life find resonance within a creative mind. Here he more explicitly articulates the struggle to unlock expressive powers, capturing the practicalities of the process.
Posted Oct 02, 2023
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Youth (Spring)
(2023)
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Jeva Lange
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Wang’s ambitions in this first part of a planned Zhili trilogy seem greater than just reminding Western audiences of the human cost behind the bargains on Shein.
Posted Oct 02, 2023
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All of Us Strangers
(2023)
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Stephanie Monohan
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By sacrificing the restraint he typically wields so skillfully, Haigh keeps the film from being truly great.
Posted Oct 02, 2023
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Hit Man
(2023)
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Elissa Suh
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The name of Linklater’s game is roleplay, and something so manufactured can only be so moving, or sexy.
Posted Oct 01, 2023
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The Human Surge 3
(2023)
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Mark Asch
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At once disorienting and amiable, marked by jumpy sudden cuts and long-take loungers, the film evokes digitally diasporic social life, with heterogeneous friendships as wormholes, traveling from phone to phone amid a jumble of different contexts.
Posted Oct 01, 2023
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New Strains
(2023)
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Caroline Golum
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A vibrantly contoured alternative to what could have been, in lesser hands, an exercise in dour claustrophobia.
Posted Jul 18, 2023
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Heavenly Creatures
(1994)
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Caroline Golum
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A pitch-perfect depiction of young womanhood, defying Lolita-ish cliche and bordering on the hysterical.
Posted May 15, 2023
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Rewind & Play
(2022)
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Elissa Suh
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Fundamentally an essay film, Rewind & Play illuminates the chasm between tendentious interviewer and inscrutable subject and exposes the slyly pernicious relationship between Black artists and white media machine in the process.
Posted Mar 13, 2023
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Crooklyn
(1994)
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Saffron Maeve
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An elegiac Bed-Stuy fairy tale.
Posted Mar 05, 2023
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The Five Devils
(2022)
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Dana Reinoos
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The Five Devils interrogates the limits of forgiveness and the long shadow of the past; but at its core, it is a story about the bonds between mother and daughter.
Posted Mar 05, 2023
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A Tale of Sorrow
(1977)
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Elissa Suh
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What launched as a largely flavorless rags-to-riches profile wrenches into a proudly florid and caustic critique—classic Suzuki.
Posted Feb 24, 2023
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A Difficult Life
(1961)
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Elissa Suh
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Romantic drama and political ideals clash with unsuspecting force in Dino Risi’s cynical examination of Italy during the disorienting aftermath of World War II.
Posted Feb 21, 2023
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EO
(2022)
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Saffron Maeve
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Skolimowski has always had an affinity for the experimental, but suffusing a source text defined by its stolid exposition with feverish, latter-day concepts ... is as clever as it is blasphemous.
Posted Oct 16, 2022
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Triangle of Sadness
(2022)
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Joshua Bogatin
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The sum total of the film’s chapters equals a general portrait of petty human cruelty more than any distinct class analysis.
Posted Oct 16, 2022
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White Noise
(2022)
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Cosmo Bjorkenheim
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Although White Noise has now been filmed, it feels as unfilmable as ever.
Posted Oct 16, 2022
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Alcarràs
(2022)
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Maxwell Paparella
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So renowned for her naturalistic treatment of early childhood in Summer 1993, Simón shows range here, demonstrating her faculty too with the aged, the adult, and the adolescent.
Posted Oct 06, 2022
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Zodiac
(2007)
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Stephanie Monohan
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Zodiac, ironically, rewards revisiting over and over, while commenting on the spiritual degradation of doing so.
Posted Oct 02, 2022
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Stars at Noon
(2022)
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Courtney Duckworth
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Stars at Noon suggests a scrambled firmament where once-fixed waymarks falter, winking hazily in the wrong light.
Posted Oct 02, 2022
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Belly
(1998)
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Patrick Dahl
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Sanctimonious, silly, occasionally brilliant and exquisitely vivid, Hype Williams’s Belly (1998) crowned the decade in which hip-hop swallowed popular culture, and we never looked back.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Casa Susanna
(2022)
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Mark Asch
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The archival images in Casa Susanna show an embrace of mainstream femininity, the norms of the society that made it a risk to even pose for them, and it is astonishing and beautiful that they survived.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Demon Seed
(1977)
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Stephanie Monohan
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Donald Cammell’s techno-natal-horror film turns a domicile of the future into a claustrophobic chamber of female oppression.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Viking
(2022)
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Mark Asch
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The entire premise feels like a very Canadian joke, almost patriotic in its knowing self-deprecation.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Saint Omer
(2022)
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Mark Asch
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[Saint Omer] treats the unaccountable power of witchcraft as a metaphor for the liminal sinkhole between the West and its former colonies.
Posted Sep 14, 2022
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Chuy, The Wolf Man
(2014)
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Patrick Dahl
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As it expands beyond the portrait of a medical curio, Chuy, The Wolf Man details pregnancies, immigration attempts, and marital troubles. The richness of these stories doesn’t require a physical abnormality to resonate.
Posted Aug 09, 2022
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Who Slew Auntie Roo?
(1972)
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Saffron Maeve
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An exercise in hagsploitation and mommy issues (the two are seldom mutually exclusive), Preminger pastiche and folk-tale simplicity, <i>Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?</i> is a terribly good time.
Posted Jul 02, 2022
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Peau D'ane
(1970)
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Saffron Maeve
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A work so warmly assured that it eludes the parabolic quality of its source material, censuring nothing but laughing at everything.
Posted Jul 02, 2022
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Life Is Sweet
(1991)
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Saffron Maeve
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<i>Life Is Sweet</i> is packed with effusive beats and familial fractures, spackling over the cracks with chocolate and treacle-soaked spinach.
Posted Jul 02, 2022
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The Happiness of the Katakuris
(2001)
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Saffron Maeve
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A defibrillator to the brain, with slutty sumo wrestlers and rolling hills to boot.
Posted Jul 02, 2022
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Midnight
(1982)
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Saffron Maeve
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It’s a horror film so mild as to inspire criticism on its own terms, but vexing enough to spook the censors all the same.
Posted Jul 02, 2022
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Sleepless
(2001)
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Saffron Maeve
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<i>Sleepless</i> sates our strangest urges.
Posted Jul 02, 2022
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2nd Chance
(2022)
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Patrick Dahl
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[Davis] is ultimately that archetypal American figure, the unflappable charlatan amassing wealth by carving breaches in the membrane separating media fantasy and political reality.
Posted Jun 30, 2022
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Paris, 13th District
(2021)
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Amy Taubin
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A film of criss-crossing storylines, all of them suggesting that coming-of-age narratives should not be limited to adolescents and may very well pertain to some of us until we die.
Posted Apr 15, 2022
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Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
(2021)
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Amy Taubin
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A pictorially elegant, gorgeously colored, radical feminist film.
Posted Feb 04, 2022
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Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché
(2021)
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Dana Reinoos
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Among the finest mother-daughter documentaries.
Posted Feb 02, 2022
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Introduction
(2021)
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Jon Dieringer
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Hong's films are seemingly guided by the faith that ... discomfort can ripen with comic pleasure and, if you look hard enough, shiver with the profound.
Posted Jan 24, 2022
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Benedetta
(2021)
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Margaret Barton-Fumo
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A fantastically shrewd, grotesque satire, and so very Verhoeven, down to the final shot.
Posted Jan 10, 2022
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Compartment No. 6
(2021)
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Annie Geng
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Kuosmanen has a gift for the understated. His images, even at their most minimal, teem with so much: hushed feelings that reject precision, emotions that crackle with illogical circuitry.
Posted Jan 10, 2022
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The Velvet Queen
(2021)
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Amy Taubin
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[A] remarkably constructed and photographed documentary [that] rewards our eyes with glorious, even sublime images.
Posted Jan 10, 2022
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Project Space 13
(2021)
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Joshua Bogatin
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In a cinema-landscape where even American indies about regional working-class issues are star-studded, multi-million dollar exercises in faux-realism, this is nothing short of refreshing.
Posted Jan 10, 2022
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The Girl and the Spider
(2021)
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Chloe Lizotte
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Scenes accrue off-kilter visual details as though they are half-remembered dreams. The atmosphere is destabilizing, like teetering on the edge of a cliff.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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Cadavres exquis
(1976)
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Chris Shields
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A somber and contemplative political whodunnit set amid the violence and radicalism that pervaded 1970s Italy.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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In Front of Your Face
(2021)
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K.F. Watanabe
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A masterclass in economical filmmaking ... and a reminder that Hong is not only among the best filmmakers working today, but also simply one of cinema's greatest storytellers.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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Red Rocket
(2021)
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Maxwell Paparella
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Every moment of confrontation falls flat against the monolith of Mikey. By the finale, his large, limp penis seems to be the film's abiding interest.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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The Tale of King Crab
(2021)
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Jeva Lange
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Like many of the best things in life, The Tale of King Crab owes its existence to a really good story, a little exaggeration, and the enthusiastic consumption of alcohol.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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Neptune Frost
(2021)
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Maxwell Paparella
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No synopsis could entirely account for the beguiling lyricism and visual plenty of this strange and wonderful film.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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Memoria
(2021)
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Maxwell Paparella
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Swinton has a way of remaining absolutely still while her mind moves quickly behind her eyes.
Posted Oct 10, 2021
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