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Psycho II / Psycho III / Bates Motel

However, that doesn’t mean one can’t make a satisfying picture that continues to tell the tale. While they’re sacrilege to some, the Psycho sequels get a bad rap, yet they’re actually pretty good, considering the awfully intimidating shadow in which they exist. The first two, 1983’s Psycho II and 1986’s Psycho III, have made their […]

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Marathon, man!

Comedy! Missed the first-season set of Episodes? Skip it. Instead, grab the new two-disc set collecting the first two years. Although very much a Hollywood in-joke, the Showtime series tells that in-joke with excellence, anchored by Friends vet Matt LeBlanc starring as an A-holier version of himself, reduced to starring on a hockey sitcom overseen […]

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Hitchcock

Hitchcock, which opens Friday, isn’t a bad movie; it’s just a baffling one. Purportedly about the making of 1960’s Psycho, it winds up a hodgepodge of old-fashioned biopic, bogus psychological thriller and simplistic domestic melodrama. The film, however, is hardly the work of incompetents. Director Sacha Gervasi has an absorbing rockumentary (Anvil: The Story of […]

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The Heineken Kidnapping

Portraying Heineken, who passed away in 2002, is Rutger Hauer. As good as he was as the Hobo with a Shotgun, that flick is a throwaway goof, whereas this carries heft and gives him a better vehicle for the dramatic might he rarely gets to show — at least in American productions; this is a […]

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