Venus in Fur, the latest from master filmmaker and convicted sex offender Roman Polanski, is more than meta: It’s meta meta.
drama
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The Swimmer
At once allegorical and existential, Frank Perry’s film follows tan-and-tone Ned Merrill (Lancaster, Field of Dreams) as he embarks on a countywide trip home via the swimming pools of his upturned-nosed neighbors. As he dips from lavish house to lavish house, visiting friends and lovers past and present, we learn more and more about Ned’s […]
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Philomena
Since the Oscar nominations were announced last month, gold-derby prognosticators have referred to Philomena as “the ninth nominee” in the Best Picture field. Their implication is that among all those films up for Hollywood’s highest honor, the British dramedy is the one least likely to win and least deserving of being there. That’s insane, of […]
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Judges Creed
Not too long ago, someone who works at Oklahoma Gazette asked, “Does anyone in Oklahoma City make movies besides Mickey Reece?” My answer was, “Of course,” supplemented with several caveats, one of which is that the local filmmaker generally makes more feature films in a year than my parents see within the same time frame. […]
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August: Osage County
“Don’t get all Carson McCullers on us,” Julia Roberts’ character warns a relative, referring to the 20th-century author who specialized in stories of Southern tragicomedy. The film takes its own advice — its first and greatest misstep. With Tulsa-born Tracy Letts adapting his 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning play for the screen, August: Osage County should wear […]
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Lone Survivor
Based on a 2007 memoir by former Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, Lone Survivor details the ill-fated Operation Red Wings. In that 2005 mission, Luttrell and three of his fellow SEALs were dispatched to assassinate a Taliban leader, Ahmad Shah, near Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains. After getting close to their target, the team was ambushed by […]
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The Snake God
Directed by Django co-scripter Piero Vivarelli, the mostly plotless Italian film follows the beautiful Paola (Nadia Cassini, Starcrash) to the luscious Caribbean, where she makes a fast friend with Stella (Beryl Cunningham, The Weekend Murders), a local babe with membership in a voodoo cult. That’s where the title comes into play, as seemingly endless drum […]
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The Wolf of Wall Street
The rise-and-fall story of real-life former penny-stocks swindler Jordan Belfort exudes a definite vibe of Scorsese déjà vu, most notably Goodfellas and Casino, even if the characters here are entitled white dudes instead of Mafiosi. Like Belfort himself, Wolf is wild, vulgar and often a helluva lot of fun. But also like its antihero, the […]
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American Hustle
Masking baldness is a small ruse, to be sure, but it’s par for the course in David O. Russell’s (Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook) loping, loopy and very funny caper set in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The story is loosely based on Abscam, a 1980 FBI sting operation that netted bribery convictions of […]
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Saving Mr. Banks
This holiday season, Hollywood’s gift to itself — oh, you shouldn’t have! — is also Walt Disney Pictures’ Christmas offering to moviegoers: Saving Mr. Banks, a depiction of the trying times that went into the making of Disney’s 1964 classic Mary Poppins. Unwrapping it, you may be surprised to learn that so much material is […]