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MOVIES

Eyes Wide Shut: Introducing Sociology – by Tim Kreider

Critical disappointment with Eyes Wide Shut was almost unanimous, and the complaint was always the same: not sexy. The national reviewers sounded like a bunch of middle-school kids who’d snuck in to see it and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped off.

The Color Purple (1985)

The Color Purple (1985) | Review by Pauline Kael

If you’re among the millions of people who have read the book, you probably expect the actors to be more important than they turn out to be. The movie is amorphous; it’s a pastoral about the triumph of the human spirit, and it blurs on you.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

STANLEY KUBRICK’S LAST FILM – BY AMY TAUBIN [FILM COMMENT]

To be blunt about it, it’s impossible at this moment to separate thoughts and feelings about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut from the fact of his death. Or to put it another way, Kubrick’s death is the closure that his final film, for better or worse, resists to the last.

Reservoir Dogs: Redemption in a Postmodern World

Tarantino is widely recognized as a quintessentially postmodern neo-noir filmmaker. His films are postmodern in the artistic sense, insofar as they are, for example, blends of genres and highly allusive. But they’re also postmodern in terms of the underlying epistemology and the position on morality and values that they take.

Straw Dogs (1971)

Straw Dogs (1971) – Review by David Denby

Although Peckinpah’s general attitudes turn out to be reactionary to the point of madness, he has never functioned better as a filmmaker: Straw Dogs is a hateful but very exciting movie.

Dirty Harry

Dirty Harry: Saint Cop – Review by Pauline Kael

Dirty Harry is obviously just a genre movie, but this action genre has always had a fascist potential, and it has finally surfaced. Since crime is caused by deprivation, misery, psychopathology, and social injustice, Dirty Harry is a deeply immoral movie.

Excalibur (1981) – Review by Pauline Kael

Boorman doesn’t bother with episodes that don’t stir him; there’s no dull connective tissue. The film is like Flaubert’s more exotic fantasies—one lush, enraptured scene after another.

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