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    • biopic
    • drama
    | Oct. 15, 2016, 12:13 p.m.
    For all we know, Bob Crane never told a lie in his life before starring in Hogan’s Heroes. When his wife confronts him about a clandestine collection of porno magazines, he stammers and hedges as though he’d never been accused of anything before. He doesn’t have the capacity to truly sell the lie, but through persistence manages to keep talking and defuse the argument. Played by Greg Kinnear, Bob Crane is a completely guileless, the cartoon portrait of a Eisenhower-era dad. As soon as the pilot for Hogan Heroes wraps he finds his relationship with women has changed
    • biopic
    • crime
    | Nov. 4, 2018, 2:45 p.m.
    Spike Lee comes out swinging in his most successful feature in decades. Here two police officers work together to infiltrate a local KKK chapter. What would be straight hagiography for any other director instead invites a critical eye. Naivety here is just as dangerous as racism and the protagonists and their cause do not escape scrutiny.
    • biopic
    • drama
    | Sept. 13, 2016, 10:22 p.m.
    For a movie destined for DVD bin sales and basic cable rotation, Cadillac Record boasts an impressive cast. Adrian Brody, Mos Def, Beyonce, Cedric the Entertainer, et al.. join to tell the story of Chess Records, a Chicago label that played a crucial link between rock and blues in the fifties and sixties. The basic arc of the narrative is common to the rock bio-pic subgenre. There’s an iconoclast who mortgages his staid placid life to commune with an outsider music he loves. That would be Leonard Chess who’s so moved by the rootsy blues of Muddy Waters
    • biopic
    • drama
    | May 11, 2019, 2:29 p.m.
    Ava DuVernay's recounting of the march on the Edmund Pettus bridge and all of the various groups that participated or antagonized it. Its a remarkably bloody period of the Civil Rights struggle, and Selma is best in the harrowing passages that highlight the high stakes and casualties. As a character study of Martin Luther King however, the film falls short
    • biopic
    • drama
    | May 6, 2018, 11:49 a.m.
    The Imitation Game serves many purposes, a biography of Alan Turing, a commentary on the cruel treatment of homosexuals in Britain throughout the twentieth century, the birthings of computing, and finally as a prestige picture for stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. It can’t be everything at once, unfortunately, and some of the conclusions reached in the closing credits seem a bit forced or unexplored. For instance some of the most dramatic actions taken by Turing’s squad, planning for the D-Day invasion for instance, are totally relegated to the credits. The assertion that cracking Enigma ended the European conflict
    • biopic
    | June 30, 2019, 1:04 a.m.
    A misguided attempt at investigating one of the most consequential humans to ever live instead devolves into a painfully-typical white savior story, and a vanity project for its star
    • biopic
    • drama
    | Oct. 1, 2016, 4:02 p.m.
    There’s a narrative popular in establishment media, propagated by the stodgy old talking heads and their formulaic entertainment. Contrary to the designation “social networks”, these online platforms that disseminate content have a de-socializing effect on its users. That these platforms that are built around information sharing and messaging have an insidious isolating effect. In this telling, social networks have produced addicts, and coddled mass shooters. Whatever Mark Zukerberg’s true character, writer Sorkin is more interested in shaping him into a human representation of social media flaws. Jessie Eisenberg portrays a clipped bird: sweaty, nervous, and fundamentally antisocial. He is deeply