January 2012

Love him or hate him, writer/director Terrence Malick has yet to make a movie that doesn’t completely envelop an audience and take control of their senses for an otherworldly experience. ‘The New World’ does that 100 percent, embedding the viewer in another time when life moved at a completely different pace than it does today.

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Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle are the best odd couple of the year and ‘The Guard’ is a very funny black comedy. In the spotty ‘Higher Ground,’ Vera Farmiga plays a woman struggling with her devout Christianity over three decades of her life.

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Dee Rees crafts a script and film that is filled with vibrant characters and exciting visuals, and Adepero Oduye brings Rees’ main character, Alike, to life in ‘Pariah.’

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‘Carnage’ is a hilarious new comedy starring Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, John C. Reilly, and Christoph Waltz as upper-middle-class parents in Brooklyn who are a little too self-obsessed.

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‘The Iron Lady’ could have been been unbridled Oscar bait, but devolves into a disastrous mess of misguided direction.

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Starting the new documentary ‘Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel’ with spotty, scratched-up film, director Alex Singleton sets the tone for the film right from the get-go.

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The Chicken and the Egg #22: Our bi-weekly movie-reference-happy comic strip here on Scene-Stealers is back. Each week his characters recreate a famous scene from a familiar film. See if you can guess this one…

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‘Straw Dogs,’ out now on DVD and Blu-ray, is a remake of a controversial 1971 movie from Sam Peckinpah starring Dustin Hoffman. ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ is a new horror movie produced by Guillermo del Toro.

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Trey Hock’s take on the best films of 2011 shows that even in a bad year for film there can be at least 10 standout motion pictures.

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The 45th Annual Kansas City Film Critics Awards were held last night. Here are the winners as picked by the second oldest critic’s organization in the country:

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‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ is the movie adaptation of John Le Carre’s 1974 novel about the hunt for a Soviet double agent at the top of the ladder in the British secret service. Gary Oldman plays the man charged with figuring out who the mole is. The audience, however, is challenged with trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

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Scene-Stealers Podcast 43 features Trevan and Eric’s fundamental difference in opinion on ‘Tinker Tailor Solider Spy,’ the new spy “thriller” opening wide this weekend. Once that’s over, they make up long enough to talk about anticipated movies of 2012.

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‘Branded to Kill’ is a hard-edged black-and-white crime movie featuring a rice-sniffing hitman, shot with unsettling camera angles, and unfolding like fever dream. Seijun Suzuki was fired for making this movie, and the new Criterion Blu-ray restores it to its full glory.

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The new Blu-ray Criterion transfer of Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Tokyo Drifter’ is a gorgeous pop-art fever dream.

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Post image for Top 10 Best Movies of 2011

Top 10 Best Movies of 2011

by Eric Melin on January 3, 2012

in Top 10s

Before I started tallying up the movies that made the biggest impression this year, I thought it may have been a weak year for film. It turns out I was dead wrong. Although only one film this year made my hair stand up on end, there were plenty of moving, adventurous, and original films in 2011.

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