November 2013

The Kansas City Art Institute and Alamo Drafthouse have joined forces to bring you Film School, a weekly student curated film series. This week – Full Metal Jacket (1987) – Sunday, December 1st.

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The danger in remaking a great film is twofold. It draws scrutiny from an existing audience familiar with the source material, but if the remake is too similar, then why create the remake in the first place. Spike Lee manages to fall victim to both.

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‘Nebraska’ bears the familiar Payne stamp of melancholy mixed with hard-edged satire, while still feeling very personal.

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McConaughey is a wonder. The actor lost 50 pounds to play the tightly coiled antihero, and he gives Woodruff a determination that’s practically unhinged.

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Catching Fire may be a slight improvement but it suffers from the same weaknesses of The Hunger Game offering plodding action sequel light on action.

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Through a rich, grueling portrait of the machinery of institutionalized slavery, Steve McQueen asks us to examine the rotten core of slavery and how it permeates our entire culture, not just to ponder life as it was in the 1840s.

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The buddy-cop movie ‘2 Guns’ is surprisingly fun, and Fox re-issues the film that defined multiple personalities forever, ‘The Three Faces of Eve,’ in a beautiful Blu-ray transfer.

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Blue is the Warmest Color, the nearly three-hour French character study of a lesbian relationship, is a remarkable film. The film’s notorious sex scenes are just a small part of the larger picture, because the movie asks a lot of timeless questions about love and devotion.

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The Kansas City Art Institute and Alamo Drafthouse have joined forces to bring you Film School, a weekly student curated film series. This week – Dancer in the Dark (2000) – Sunday, November 24th.

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It’d been nearly a decade since I’d last seen Empire Records before I went to the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet to catch it last Thursday.

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The International House of Prayer, based right here in Kansas City, has ulterior motives in Uganda besides missionary work. Oscar-winning director Roger Ross Williams new documentary ‘God Loves Uganda’ is an interesting look at the result of their efforts.

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The 2013 Fantastic Fest Tour at the Alamo Drafthouse! Without a doubt, 2013 had one of the strongest and most eclectic lineups in the history of film festivals, and now you can find out for yourself as a condensed version hits Kansas City this weekend.

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Two new Blu-ray releases: A melancholy Christmas story and another opportunity for Roland Emmerich to blow up the White House.

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As Marvel’s cinematic universe extends into its second phase, Thor: The Dark World finds itself sandwiched between movies seven and nine in the franchise (or one and three, depending on how you look at it).

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The supernatural-inflected teen romance genre butts uncomfortably up against an apocalyptic survival story in How I Live Now, which opens this weekend at AMC Studio 30 in Olathe and Liberty Hall in Lawrence.

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