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Recent Posts Tagged With 'crime'
No Country for Old Men (2007)
I’m fixin’ to do something dumber than hell, but I’m going anyways. Ten years ago, movies like this didn’t win Best Picture. They lost to safe, happy movies like Forrest Gump and Shakespe...
Gone Baby Gone (2007)
My priest says shame is God telling you what you did was wrong. All of the reflexive Ben Affleck haters reading this will probably take heart that he appears nowhere on screen during this movie and s...
We Own the Night (2007)
If you piss in your pants, you only stay warm for so long. Despite the “One Degree of Marky-Mark,” this film is not quite the rip-off of The Departed that it appears to be on the surface, but it...
The Brave One (2007)
…when you love something, every time a bit of it goes, you lose a piece of yourself. No matter how much lipstick you put on this pig, in the form of an accomplished, Oscar-winning star and an O...
Ocean’s Thirteen (2007)
I was really hoping we could avoid this. 2007 appears to have been the year of thirds, meaning the third entry in some highly visible film franchises. We had a third Shrek movie, a third Jason Bourn...
American Gangster (2007)
Judges, lawyers, cops, politicians. They stop bringing dope into this country, about a hundred thousand people are gonna be out of a job. With the creative pedigree behind this film, if it had merely...
The Lookout (2007)
Everything’s a story. Stories are what help us make sense of the world. As the screenwriter of Get Shorty and Out of Sight, writer/director Scott Frank knows his way around a caper movie, which...
Hot Fuzz (2007)
Well, I wouldn’t argue that it wasn’t a “no holds barred, adrenaline fueled thrill ride,” but there is no way you can perpetrate that amount of carnage and mayhem and not incur a considerable ...
RoboCop (1987)
I’ll buy that for a dollar! Although clearly intended as insightful social commentary on the Reagan era, Paul Verhoeven’s first American film works better as straight action with a dose of comedy...
Zodiac (2007)
Zodiac was my job. It is not yours. During its theatrical release, David Fincher’s Zodiac was at least partially marketed as some kind of slasher film from the director of Se7en. This probably acco...
The French Connection (1971)
I wouldn’t be infringing on your coffee break if I thought it was a nickel-and-dimer. William Friedkin’s The French Connection is a lean, uncompromising example of filmmaking without a single gra...
Laura (1944)
In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. As a teenager in the 1940s, my mother was a self-professed movie buff, spending a lot of her free time with her friends at the matinees and double...
Call Northside 777 (1948)
Did it ever occur to you that we might be sellin’ this dead cop short? Maybe he had a mother that scrubbed floors, too. This fact-based account of a crusading journalist trying to exonerate a m...