Limitless

This movie was on circuit and is now available on M-Net's Box Office, a nifty little product that allows you to rent movies and then downloads them to your home TV, which is where I saw it.

I certainly know how Eddie Morra feels. Like him, I know almost everything, but have forgotten most of it. We are told time and again that we use onl...
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The Help

"The Help" is a safe film about a volatile subject. Presenting itself as the story of how African-American maids in the South viewed their employers during Jim Crow days, it is equally the story of how they empowered a young white woman to write a best-seller about them, and how that book transformed the author's mother. We are happy f...
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Welcome to the Rileys

"Welcome to the Rileys" takes two old plots and makes a rather touching new plot out of them. What we've seen before is (1) the good man who hopes to redeem a prostitute, and (2) the frozen suburban couple who find new hope in their marriage. The film involves such characters in a story that is a little more real and inv...
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The Conspirator

The theme of "The Conspirator," Robert Redford's latest film, is the rule of law in the aftermath of a national tragedy, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who died on April 15 in 1865.  The film takes up the story in a postwar Washington, convincingly shot on location in Savannah, Georgia.

Redford approaches ...
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Beautiful Boy

The death of a child is a calamity. When that child has gone on a killing rampage at his campus and then taken his own life, it must be a tragedy so fundamental that it paralyzes thought. “Beautiful Boy” gives us a glimpse of the young student on the night before his murders, and then is about how his parents live with what he has do...
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Jesus Christ Superstar at Montecasino

 Pieter Toerien's production of Jesus Christ Superstar is currently running at the Teatro at Montecasino in Johannesburg.  It is a brilliant interpretation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber/ Tim Rice blockbuster that was first staged on Broadway in 1971.

 Standing at the urinals during the intermission, listening to at least four...
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The Lincoln Lawyer

There is nothing quite like a movie about a smart guy who is a wise ass, and thinks his way out of tangles with criminals. I like courtroom scenes. I like big old cars. I like “The Lincoln Lawyer” because it involves all three, and because it matches Matthew McConaughey with a first-rate supporting cast, while so many thrillers ...
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The Way Back

Not every incredible story makes a compelling movie. "The Way Back", showing at Hyde Park and Cinema Nouveau in Rosebank,  is inspired by a 4,000-mile foot journey that began with an escape from a Siberian prison camp in the dead of winter and continued across Mongo...
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Somewhere

SOMEWHERE won the Golden Lion Award for Best Picture at the 2010 Venice Film Festival, which means there is probably a class of cinephile who will lap up Somewhere, savouring its bland flavour between bites of Baluga caviar and sips of Margaux 1982 Cabernet Sauvignon. For the rest of us, though, this movie works best as a sleep tonic. Somewhere ...
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Rabbit Hole

 In "Rabbit Hole," Becca and Howie are trying their best to get on with things. This is the tricky and very observant story of how a married couple is getting along, eight months after their 4-year-old ran out into the street and was struck dead by a car. They were leveled with grief. Their sex life stopped. They lived for a time ...
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Another Year

My wife chose this this Mike Leigh film quite randomly and what a gem it turned out to be.  I would recommend it to anyone, without any reservation whatsoever.

This is a masterpiece of sympathy, penetrating observation, and instinct for human comedy. By that I don't mean “comedy” as in easy laughter. I mean that com...
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The Fighter

Micky Ward has less personality than the hero of any other boxing movie I can remember. Maybe that's because he can't get a word in edgewise. He has a motormouth crackhead for a brother, a mom who acts as his manager and seven blond-headed sisters who seem to be on a break from a musical being filmed on the next soundstage. It's easy to imagine ...
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True Grit

In the Coen Brothers' “True Grit,” Jeff Bridges is not playing the John Wayne role. He's playing the Jeff Bridges role — or, more properly, the role created in the enduring novel by Charles Portis, much of whose original dialogue can be heard in this film.

Bridges doesn't have the archetypal stature of the Duke. Few eve...
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THE KING'S SPEECH

 "The King's Speech" tells the story of a man compelled to speak to the world with a stammer. It must be painful enough for one who stammers to speak to another person. To face a radio microphone and know the British Empire is listening must be terrifying. At the time of the speech mentioned in this title, a quarter of the Earth's...
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Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's “Black Swan” is a full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centres on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic, and mirrors the conflict of good and evil in Tchaikovsky's ballet “Swan Lake.” It is one thing to lose yourself in your art...
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The Secret In Their Eyes (El Secreto de sus ojos)

"The Secret in Their Eyes" opens with the meeting, after many years, of Benjamin (Ricardo Darin) and Irene (Soledad Villamil). She is a judge. He is a retired criminal investigator. They are just a little too happy to see each other. Twenty-five years ago, when she was assistant to a judge and he was an investigator under her, they wer...
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Hereater (directed by Clint Eastwood)

Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter" considers the idea of an afterlife with tenderness, beauty and a gentle tact. I found it enthralling and unnervingly spiritual.  I certainly believe in an afterlife, but I suspect, Eastwood may not. This is a film about the afterlife that carefully avoids committing itself on such a possibility. The cl...
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The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest

Lisbeth Salander makes a transfixing heroine precisely because she has nothing but scorn for such a role. Embodied here for the third time by Noomi Rapace, she's battered, angry and hostile, even toward those who would be her friends. Some of the suspense in the final courtroom showdown of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" comes ...
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The Girl Who Played With Fire

The girl is an enigma. She has a dragon tattoo, she plays with fire, she kicks a hornet's nest. These are not personality traits. We learn in the second movie based on a Stieg Larsson thriller a little more about her childhood, and her fiery relationship with her father. What we don't learn is why she is content to live the life of a hermit, req...
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is a compelling thriller to begin with, but it adds the rare quality of having a heroine more fascinating than the story. She's a 24-year-old goth girl named Lisbeth Salander, with body piercings and tattoos: thin, small, fierce, damaged, a genius computer hacker. She smokes to quiet her racing hea...
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The Kids Are All Right

Oceans

Oceans, Disneynature’s second in a yearly series of nature documentaries, hits screens on Earth Day. The documentary should find even more success than its predecessor, Earth, did last year. Earth eventually earned over $30 million domestically and was a worldwide success, a feat for the documentary genre. Oceans is simply amazing at times...
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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" (1987) was a wake-up call about the financial train wreck the Street was headed for. Had we only listened. Or perhaps we listened too well, and Gordon ("Greed Is Good") Gekko became the role model for a generation of amoral financial pirates who put hundreds of millions into their pockets while ba...
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The Other Man

Peter (Liam Neeson) and Lisa (Laura Linney) have been married for 30 years. He is a successful web designer, and she is a shoe designer on the fashion show circuit. After receiving much praise for her latest creations, she has dinner with her husband and casually asks him whether he believes that couples can really stay together for their entire...
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SALT

"Salt" is a damn fine thriller. It does all the things I can't stand in bad movies, and does them in a good one. It's like a rebuke to all the lousy action movie directors who've been banging pots and pans together in our skulls. It winds your clock tight and the alarm doesn't go off for 100 minutes.

It's gloriously absu...
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Chloe

Looking down from her office window, she sees a young woman who has the manner and routine of a high-priced call girl. This she stores in her memory. When her husband says he missed his flight back to Toronto and she finds a disturbing photo on his iPhone, she goes to the hotel where she saw the girl, makes eye contact with her in a bar, contriv...
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Mao's Last Dancer 8/10

Born into a peasant family in a Chinese village during Mao's Cultural Revolution, Li Cunxin (as child Huang Wen Bin, as teenager Chengwu Guo, as adult Chi Cao) is selected by Communist Party officials for special training at the dance academy in Beijing. He grows into a talented and powerful young dancer, making a cultural exchange visit to the ...
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I Love You Phillip Morris 2/10

“Love sure is a funny thing,” muses Jim Carrey at the start of I Love You Phillip Morris, but you wouldn’t know it from the evidence offered by this mirthless, aggressively tasteless dramedy. Clumsily toeing the line between adolescent humour and heart-tugging melodrama, this debut feature from screenwriters Glenn Ficarr...
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The Boys are Back

"The Boys Are Back" is the true story of a man who must suddenly raise his two sons alone after the untimely passing of his second wife. The ill-prepared Joe, who is dealing with his own loss, is confronted with the daily challenges of parenthood while coping with his young son Artie's expressions of grief.

The opening shot sho...
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The Ghost Writer

In Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer," a man without a past rattles around in the life of a man with too much of one. He begins by reading the work of an earlier ghost who mysteriously drowned, and finds it boring and conventional. Hired to pep up the manuscript to justify a $10 million advance, he discovers material to make it exciti...
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Sex and the City 2

The characters of "Sex and the City 2" are flyweight bubbleheads living in a world which rarely requires three sentences in a row. Their defining quality is consuming things. They gobble food, fashion, houses, husbands, children, vitamins and freebies. They must plan their wardrobes on the phone, so often do they appear in different ba...
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The Hurt Locker

by Rev (Lt Col) Brent Chalmers

I finally got to see Academy Award winning "The Hurt Locker" with my wife and son last night.  As many of you may or may not know, I spent twelve years in the South African Defence Force as an artillery officer (hence my lifelong support for Arsenal Football Club), many of them on the ...
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Crazy Heart

Crazy Heart

BY ROGER EBERT / December 23, 2009

   
Some actors are blessed. Jeff Bridges is one of them. Ever since his breakthrough role in "The Last Picture Show" in 1971, he has, seemingly without effort, created a series of characters who we simply believe, even the alien "S...
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AN EDUCATION

"An Education" tells the story of a 16-year-old girl who is the target of a sophisticated seduction by a 35-year-old man. This happens in 1961, when 16-year-old girls were a great deal less knowing than they are now. Yet the movie isn't shabby or painful, but romantic and wonderfully entertaining.

It depends on a British...
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The Lovely Bones

"The Lovely Bones" is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you...
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Invictus

Morgan Freeman has been linked to one biopic of Nelson Mandela or another for at least 10 years. Strange that the only one to be made centres on the Springbok rugby team. The posters for Clint Eastwood's "Invictus" feature Matt Damon in the foreground, with Freeman looming behind him in shadowy nobility. I can imagine the marketing mee...
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Brothers (The Alternative Review)

War is bad. I mean, it really is. It’s like you have to do horrible things to people who want to kill you. Sometimes you do things you wish you hadn’t and then you want to change. Even if you aren’t in a war you sometimes do things you shouldn’t have done. Changing is hard. If you are nice to people, changing is easier. P...
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Brothers

"Brothers” is the new film by Jim Sheridan, a director who has a sure hand with stories about families (“In America” “In the Name of the Father,” “The Boxer”). This one is about a family twisted from its natural form when the father leaves for service in Afghanistan just after his brother comes home...
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AVATAR

 Watching "Avatar," I felt the same as when I saw "Star Wars" in 1977. That was another movie I walked into with uncertain expectations. James Cameron's film has been the subject of relentlessly dubious advance buzz, just as his "Titanic" was. Once again, he has silenced the doubters by simply delivering an extraordinary film. There is still at ...
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Julie & Julia

In 30-minute programs on TV, Julia Child was priceless. But to live with her, I suspect, must have taken the patience of a saint. Her husband Paul in “Julie & Julia” is portrayed as a saint, so that explains her marriage.

Now about Julie Powell. That’s the woman who wrote an online journal documenting her vow...
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Whatever Works

Woody Allen said in “Manhattan” that Groucho Marx was first on his list of reasons to keep on living. His new film, “Whatever Works,” opens with Groucho singing “Hello, I Must Be Going” from “Animal Crackers.” It serves as the movie’s theme song, summarizing in five words the world view of hi...
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The Visitor

Richard Jenkins is an actor who can move his head half an inch and provide the turning point of a film. That happens in "The Visitor," where he plays a man around 60 who has essentially shut down all of his emotions. A professor, he has been teaching the same class for years and cares nothing about it. He coldly rejects a student's lat...
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EARTH

This beautifully filmed BBC documentary marches through the seasons on Planet Earth. It begins in winter darkness at the North Pole with a mother polar bear coming out of a five-month hibernation with two adorable cubs. A male bear is out looking for food on the ice and having very little luck.

In Africa, elephants and their child...
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LAST CHANCE HARVEY

"Last Chance Harvey" is a tremendously appealing love story surrounded by a movie not quite worthy of it. For Dustin Hoffman, after years of character roles (however good) and dubbing the voices of animated animals, it provides a rare chance to play ... an ordinary guy. For Emma Thompson, there is an opportunity to use her gifts for ta...
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EASY VIRTUE

Unusually for a play by Noel Coward, Love struggles while conquering All in "Easy Virtue," a subversive view of British country-house society between the wars. That era has been described as the most blessed in modern history (assuming you were Upstairs and not Down), but not here, where the Whittakers occupy a mouldering pile in the c...
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DISGRACE

It’s a major scoop to get an actor with the skills of John Malkovich to star in an Australian funded film, it’s an added bonus that the film turns out as good as ‘Disgrace’ has. This isn’t just one of the finest Australian films to be released this year this is one the best films that has surfaced anywhere this year...
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MY SISTER'S KEEPER: 8.5/10

“My Sister’s Keeper,” based on a best-selling novel by Jodi Picoult, is an unapologetic — shameless? ruthless? — weepie, exploiting the grave illness of a lovely, lively, blameless girl from start to finish. I blubbed unashamedly for almost the entire 90 minutes.

It is an immediate audience-grabber, a...
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CROSSING OVER: 8/10

Americans spend a lot of time talking about the American Dream and have too much suspicion about those who want to live it. Feelings against immigrants are so freely expressed even in polite society that you'd think they all went there for the free lunch. "Crossing Over" creates a mosaic, too simplistic to be sure, of recent arrivals w...
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Adam

Adam seems to be a good catch for a young woman. He’s good-looking, works as an engineer, has a big, comfy apartment, is fascinated by astronomy and knows lots and lots of stuff. However, he has Asperger’s syndrome. Beth has never met anyone like him. He behaves in social situations with an honesty that approaches cruelty and doesn&r...
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DISTRICT 9

Well, I got to see District 9 last night and had to think twice about reviewing it in an essentially spiritual medium like the Soul Provider website.  It's violent and every second word is "Fok" but somehow it works well, is thought-provoking and hugely entertaining. 

I would suppose that there’s no reas...
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GENOVA

In a Chicago winter, a mother is driving in light traffic along a snowy road. In the back seat her two daughters, one teenage, the other younger, are playing a car spotting game, giggling as they take turns to cover their eyes. Suddenly the screen goes black and we hear all the sounds of a terrible accident.

The younger girl awake...
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HEAVEN ON EARTH 7/10

It is not often that the main theatre at the Cinema Nouveau complex in Rosebank has no more than twenty customers.  To make matters worse I counted at least five people leaving early.  That was a great pity, because this is a masterful drama of domestic violence and a true art-house movie.

"Better hell than a heaven...
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THE SONG OF SPARROWS 7.5/10

The Song of Sparrows
Directed by Majid Majidi


Karim (Reza Naji) lives with his wife Narges (Maryam Akbari), two daughters and son in a small village west of Tehran. He works as chief ostrich wrangler at a ranch and has a deep love for these animals. However, Karim knows that things have taken a bad turn for him when...
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BRUNO 3/10

Here’s the bad news: “Brüno” is no “Borat.” Here’s the worse news: “Brüno” crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously to genuinely awful.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to his 2006 hit stars the English comic actor as a blond, flamboyantly gay fashion...
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Young Victoria 5/10

This is the kind of flouncy historical drama that Britain just can’t seem to shake the habit of making. It’s a movie in which a life is captured and contained in a series of beautifully executed miniatures. It’s decorative, but suffers from a stultifying lack of drama.

The Young Victoria, which is directed by the...
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SUNSHINE CLEANING 7/10

"Sunshine Cleaning" is a sunny little movie despite its dark material.  Its heroine, Rose, is a single mom in desperate need of income, trapped in a one-way affair with her high-school beau, who fathered her son but married someone else. Her son is always in trouble at school. Her sister, Norah, is a hard-living goofball. Then Ros...
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MILK 9.75/10

Sean Penn amazes me. Not long before seeing "Milk," I viewed his work in "Dead Man Walking" again. Few characters could be more different, few characters could seem more real. He creates a character with infinite attention to detail, and from the heart out. Here he creates a character who may seem like an odd bird to mainstre...
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THEN SHE FOUND ME 8.25/10

 “Then She Found Me,” a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment. The directorial debut of Helen Hunt, who plays April Epner, an anxious 39-year-old kindergarten teacher in New York City, it has all the ingredients of a slick, commercial farce, which it emphatically is not.<...
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ANGELS & DEMONS 7.5/10

Since "Angels & Demons" depends on a split-second schedule and a ticking time bomb that could destroy the Vatican, it's a little distracting when the Camerlengo, a priest entrusted with the pope's duties between papacies, breaks into the locked enclave of the College of Cardinals and lectures them on centuries of church history. Read More

ELEGY 7.5/10

Ben Kingsley, who can play just about any role, seems to be especially effective playing slimy intellectuals. "Elegy" is a film that could have been made for him, although by the time it's over, Penelope Cruz has slipped away with it, and transformed Kingsley's character in the process. It's nicely done.

Kingsley plays D...
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GRAN TORINO 8.5/10

I would like to grow up to be like Clint Eastwood. Eastwood the director, Eastwood the actor, Eastwood the invincible, Eastwood the old man. What other figure in the history of the cinema has been an actor for 53 years, a director for 37, won two Oscars for direction, two more for best picture, plus the Thalberg Award, and at 78 can direct himse...
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THE READER 8.75/10

The crucial decision in "The Reader" is made by a 24-year-old youth, who has information that might help a woman about to be sentenced to life in prison, but withholds it. He is ashamed to reveal his affair with this woman. By making this decision, he shifts the film's focus from the subject of German guilt about the Holocaust and turn...
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CHANGELING 8.75/10

Clint Eastwood's "Changeling" made me feel sympathy, and then anger, and then back around again. It is the factual account of a mother whose little boy disappeared, and of a corrupt Los Angeles Police Department running wild. Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, whose 9-year-old son, Walter, went missing in March 1928. So...
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SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE 10/10

Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" hits the ground running. This is a breathless, exciting story, heartbreaking and exhilarating at the same time, about a Mumbai orphan who rises from rags to riches on the strength of his lively intelligence. The film's universal appeal will present the real India to millions of moviegoers for the fir...
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FROST NIXON

Strange, how a man once so reviled has gained stature in the memory. How we cheered when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency! How dramatic it was when David Frost cornered him on TV and presided over the humiliating confession that he had stonewalled for three years. And yet how much more intelligent, thoughtful and, well, presidential, he ...
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THE DUCHESS

Much is made in Britain of the fact that Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806) was the great-great-great-great-aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. I wouldn't know where to start in counting my own great-great-great-great-aunts, but the Brits have an obsession with genealogy, and then too both women married men who were fabulously wealth...
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DOUBT

A Catholic grade school could seem like a hermetically sealed world in 1964. That's the case with St. Nicholas in the Bronx, ruled by the pathologically severe principal Sister Aloysius, who keeps the students and nuns under her thumb and is engaged in an undeclared war with the new parish priest. Their issues may seem to center around the refor...
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