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Under the Skin

That this publication does not use a “star” rating system for reviews is a fact for which I have never been more grateful than when faced with discussing Under the Skin. If I had to rate in on a scale of one to five, I would rate it green. Or perhaps radishes. That’s how off the scale it is.

In Bloom

Nana Ekvtimishvili’s often poignant and disturbing In Bloom has a limited current events significance. As Russia’s Vladimir Putin digests his recent acquisition of the Crimean peninsula, some observers are recalling Putin and Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, despite President George W. Bush’s objections and Putin’s promises.

The Missing Picture

Although he has spent 25 years chronicling the lives of his fellow Cambodians post-Khmer Rouge, filmmaker Rithy Panh has largely avoided focusing on the four years from 1975 to 1979. That was when the Khmer Rouge held control over Cambodia, causing the deaths, either through execution or starvation, of 20 percent of the country’s population. A boy of 13 when they took over the government and herded populations out of cites to become farm workers, Panh witnessed the deaths of everyone in his family before escaping the country and settling in Paris.

Dom Hemingway

Now past 40, Jude Law is no longer the lean, quietly intense youth who was once named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive. As the titular character in Dom Hemingway, he is bulky, be-muttonchopped and noisily intense. We first see him in a scene that might have been taken from Chopper, with Eric Bana as an imprisoned but unrepentant Australian gangster: Shirtless, facing the camera in his prison cell, Hemingway bellows a paean to himself, or more specifically the part of himself found ’twixt naval and knee. “Is not my cock exquisite?” he roars, beginning a narcissistic and very funny monologue that culminates in a self-defeating punchline.

Transcendence

In Wally Pfister’s new, inflated sci-fi category-buster Transcendence, a federal secret agent, meeting with an FBI guy, asks him, “And the computer controls all this?”



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