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Bright Star

Has there ever been an English-language film with such an excruciatingly sad love story as the one in writer/director Jane Campion’s Bright Star? I can’t recall one. The film’s star-crossed lovers are historical characters, one of them the great English Romantic poet John Keats. But Campion hasn’t allowed that fact to inflate her film into a mere biographical dramatization. Bright Star has an intimate scale; its dimensions are human and personal.

Capitalism: A Love Story



Whip It

It’s hard to believe that a dull movie could be made out of a subject as exploitable as roller derby, but we live in an age of endless miracles. Roller derby, for those of you who may be unfamiliar, is a team-sport equivalent of professional wrestling, like hockey but less respectable, in which women with fanciful names and rink personas skate around trying to knock each other out of the way.

Zombieland

Zombie movies, a horror subgenre invented by George Romero in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, have always had an element of satire to them. That expanded into outright comedy in the mid 1980s when movies like The Evil Dead and Return of the Living Dead figured out that zombies were a great vehicle for reviving Three Stooges-style slapstick (as well as an excuse for more excessive gore than the MPAA had previously allowed).



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