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Last Night on Late Night, 5/21/15: Conan gives his staff a performance review and Heidi Klum smuggles scrotums

Last night on late night, there was no Letterman. Conan gave his staff at “Conaco” a performance review, Jimmy Fallon talked to Dwayne Johnson and Meghan Trainor, Kimmel talked goombahs and gangsters with Ray Liotta, and Seth Meyers talked Kangaroo parts with Heidi Klum.

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‘Stretch’ is Joe Carnahan’s most bonkers, and perhaps most personal film yet

The opening scene of Joe Carnahan’s latest shows a man getting jettisoned from the driver’s side window of his car in a crash, hitting the ground rolling and ending up sitting on the street with barely a scratch. That’s how this film begins, and it only gets zanier from there. The plot follows a down-on-his-luck limo driver, Stretch (Patrick Wilson), who finds out he has to pay $6,000 of gambling debts by midnight. Roger Karos (Chris Pine), a deranged billionaire, offers to cover his debt if he drives him around for the evening, an experience that gets more hellish with each passing minute.

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‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ flirts with danger, but never goes all-in

Better Living Through Chemistry flirts with danger from its opening moments, in which a narrator first says that while each of us can’t help everyone, everyone can help someone, and follows it up by saying that our lead character would dismiss that sentiment as fortune-cookie foolishness. That character, portrayed by Sam Rockwell, who grows more Sam Rockwell-esque by the minute here, would be right to do so, but the film he occupies essentially embraces that sentiment, if to a slightly amoral extent. Better Living Through Chemistry is, seemingly, a bit desperate to both occupy the same satiric subgenre as American Beauty and to be so emphatically unique among other American Beauty-esque films that it’s unable to fully achieve either goal in the end.

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‘Narc’ a blisteringly powerful and sublimely raw thriller

Narc Directed by Joe Carnahan Written by Joe Carnahan US, 2003 It’s a bitterly cold early morning in a slum neighborhood in Detroit, MI, but that doesn’t stop two men from braving the conditions in sparse clothing. They’re high as kites and running at full pelt anyway, plus they have more pertinent things of their …

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How Smokin’ Aces attempted to subvert action movies…and failed

In early 2006, there was released a superb teaser trailer for what looked like a chaotic, testosterone fuelled action film of insane sensibility. Opening with classical music and title cards revealing that this movie was from “the makers of” Four Weddings & A Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually, the brief spot promptly nuked the …

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‘The Iceman’ boasts a solid ensemble, but a weak, rushed script

The Iceman exists in a strange kind of cinematic purgatory, in which reside those movies that are both too rushed and too slow. With actors like Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, and Winona Ryder among the key players, this period piece about a particularly sociopathic Mob enforcer’s rise to some level of infamy is, at best, decent.

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Novelistic ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’ is the first truly great film of 2013

The Place Beyond the Pines, so called for the English translation of the Mohawk word “Schenectady,” is close to a carousel in structure, one that would not be out of place at that traveling carnival where we first meet Luke in an extended tracking shot. Round and round it goes, taking the audience on an exacting, circular up-and-down ride. Cianfrance, along with co-writers Ben Coccio and Darius Marder, lets the film linger in moments, allowing it a hypnotic, novelistic pacing.

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‘Killing Them Softly’ is an enthralling crime film of furious execution

Killing Them Softly Written for the screen and directed by Andrew Dominik USA, 2012 Set against the backdrop of the 2008 US election, chunks of both major parties’ campaign rhetoric, as well as that of former President Bush, permeate select scenes of Killing Them Softly via background radios and televisions, entering like tumbleweeds rolling across …

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‘The Details’ is an overstuffed, but never dull, suburban satire

The Details Directed by Jacob Aaron Estes Written by Jacob Aaron Estes USA, 2011 Tobey Maguire exists in a kind of netherworld as a performer. When he played Peter Parker in the original Spider-Man trilogy, he was often criticized for looking too old to play a high school senior or, later, a college freshman. (This, …

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