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Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

When Morgan Spurlock made a splash with his 2004 film Super Size Me, he seemed like the perfect fellow for a niche that needed to be filled: a documentarian with a pleasant personality to follow in the wake of Michael Moore, a humorist unlikely to make as many enemies. Like Moore he made himself an integral part of his story, exposing the dangers of fast food by eating nothing but McDonald’s for an entire month and monitoring the effects it had on his body and life.

Incendies

In this Canadian film that was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar last year, director Denis Villeneuve has carefully worked to assemble visual and audio details that will contribute to striking and evocative settings to draw audiences into his complex international narrative. But that story, and most of its central and subsidiary characters, have been conceived and portrayed in such unpersuasively exaggerated terms that the sympathetic identification Villeneuve and his film are apparently trying to encourage is thwarted. So is the moral insight he’s tried to convey.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Whatever you do, make sure that the theater where you see this new documentary from Werner Herzog is showing the 3D version. I’m not a big fan of 3D to begin with—frankly it’s a gimmick I hope will pass on soon, as it adds nothing to most films and results in a murky image. But if Herzog wants to use it, I want to see what he decides to do with it.

The Hangover Part II

This sequel to the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time (a rather specific statistic, but Hollywood thrives on those) hews to drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Brigg’s number one criteria for sequels: As far as possible, make the exact same movie. The location has changed from Las Vegas to Thailand, but fans of The Hangover will otherwise be happy to learn that they don’t have to worry about trying to follow a new plot here: It’s pretty much the same movie with better scenery.



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