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Matchstick Men
Another gem of misdirection in Criterion’s ‘Con Collection’ with the inimitable Nic Cage taking the lead. Cage’s performance is…Cage…alternating between charm, pathos, manic intensity, and an over-the-top set of tics. Matchstick Men conforms to the genre’s demand for a giant flip at the end as the con is revealed. In a lot of con movies,…
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After Hours
Not as famous as the movies that surrounded it, but After Hours is very much Scorsese at his peak. Griffin Dunne finds himself in a late night fever dream, swallowed up by the craziness of SoHo when it was still SoHo. And no matter how hard he tries, he cannot get home. Each time he…
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The Sting
Criterion’s newest collection is movies all about con-games. I love this sub-genre and while some great ones are missing, you can choose from The Grifters, The Lady Eve, Trouble in Paradise, Matchstick Men and, of course, the platonic form of con movies, The Sting. Few movies have such balanced leading-man roles and both Redford and…
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Tetris
Not quite as elegant or compelling as the game itself, the origin story nevertheless manages to tell a fascinating and surprisingly sweet tale of gamesmanship and devotion to craft. Yes, the closing sequences in Russia border on farce and do the movie a disservice, but the essence of the story, much like the game, is…
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Dark City
The year before Matrix and more than a decade before Inception came Dark City. Perhaps The Matrix’s all-around brilliance and incredible special effects cast a permanent shadow on Dark City. Yet it is a compelling and fascinating story in its own right. And I can’t help but think Nolan’s incredible shifting cityscapes owe some debt…
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The Day of the Jackal
As the elaborate cat-and-mouse game unfolds, it’s never quite clear who is the hunted and who the hunter. The Jackal (a brilliant Edward Fox as a professional assassin) is stalking de Gaulle. And the entire French government is stalking the Jackal. I suppose one knows that de Gaulle isn’t going to die, but what makes…
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Midnight Run
Charles Grodin displays immense actorly patience, letting you warm to his character oh so slowly. His blank, backward-staring gaze – not De Niro’s fire, humor and despair – dominate Midnight Run. Then come the moments when he confiscates “counterfeit” bills, slams the train door on De Niro, and turns out, gloriously, to be a pilot.…
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The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
As straightforward an account of the problem of transformative experience as you will ever find, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar tells the tale of man who, in the experience of acquiring a difficult skill, finds his preferences and values so changed that his original purpose for wanting the skill no longer applies. Children’s books,…
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It’s Quieter in the Twilight
Fifteen billion miles from Earth, the Voyager spacecraft glide outward into the vast of interstellar space. They are still working, still communicating, but with power levels in a long, slow decline toward final dysfunction. While in Pasadena, a dozen or so aging engineers, programmers and scientists – the sort of people one NEVER sees on…
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The Eight Mountains
The journey from book to movie is arduous and fraught. It is exceedingly rare for a movie to flatly exceed its source (e.g. The Godfather) and perhaps even less common for the movie to be a perfect distillation of the novel. The Eight Mountains is that. It brings every scene and every character to life…
We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational
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