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Homeland, Ep. 4.11, “Krieg Nicht Lieb” is a twisty mess

I don’t think we can ever win with Homeland, and we need to accept that. There will always be a frustrating polarity present, because it has always been there and it seems content to stay there. The series gives in to its best and worst tendencies on a weekly basis, thrilling in one scene with refreshing ease and then backpedalling in the next. It is a careful mediation on modern war, but it is also the 24-esque twisty action show. Sometimes, that binary opposition is entertaining and even beneficial, but other times—like this episode—it just feels disappointing.

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The Nostalgia Files: ‘Last Action Hero’ (1993)

Last Action Hero Written by Zak Penn, Adam Leff, Shane Black, and David Argott Directed by John McTiernan USA, 1993 The concept of a film within a film is an idea that provides for truly interesting cinema. Films that are self-referential, satiric, and make fun of their own genre are often hilarious, thought-provoking, and downright …

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GFF 2014: ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ is perhaps Wes Anderson’s most ambitious film to date, and one of his best

More than perhaps any other director, the work of Ernst Lubitsch has been the most noticeable influence on Wes Anderson’s style. Though the great German-American writer-director, most prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, was never quite so aesthetically bold in the look of his sets, he too was preoccupied with meticulous staging for comedy within his chosen locales, be they the titular Shop Around the Corner or the Parisian hotel of Ninotchka; The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in a fictional European country, the Republic of Zubrowka, another Lubitsch trait from works like The Merry Widow and The Love Parade, though The Shop Around the Corner happens to be set in the city Anderson’s mountaintop lodging house takes its name from. He garnered the descriptor of ‘the Lubitsch touch’ thanks to the moving sincerity that always made itself evident within even his more broad comedic premises, and Anderson’s own best work is that in which a recognisable humanism always makes itself known and potent even within the stylised stiltedness through which most of his characters are written and performed.

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Before ‘The Grandmaster’ cuts, there was Harvey Weinstein’s take on ‘Mimic’

In his review of The Grandmaster, Josh Spiegel notes that the American cut of Wong Kar-Wai’s new film “never stops letting its audience know that a fuller cut exists.” The blame for those missing 20 minutes appears to rest squarely on the shoulders of Harvey Weinstein, studio executive and co-founder of The Weinstein Company.

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Louie, Ep. 3.08: “Dad” the show’s most brazenly cinematic outing yet

Louie, Season 3, Episode 8: “Dad” Written by Louis CK Directed by Louis CK Airs Thursdays at 10:30pm ET on FX After last week’s mostly “off” outing, Louie comes back swinging with one of its most brazenly cinematic episodes, a 22-minute whip-pan through a wide variety of topics and moods that feels very much like …

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