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By NICK PINKERTON
A significant portion of Tim Burton's output over the past decade has been concerned with slipping the "Burton treatment" to susceptible texts:... More >>
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By NICK PINKERTON
Frank (Joel Murray) is an outcast. We first meet this divorced, fiftyish, glumly alcoholic white-collar worker—the protagonist of Bobcat... More >>
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By ALISON WILLMORE
Japan's Hirokazu Koreeda has always been an astute, patient observer of all human behavior, but between 2004's Nobody Knows—about four kids... More >>
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By BENJAMIN MERCER
The bookish young lovers at the heart of the Chilean film Bonsái have cultivated an almost militant seriousness when it comes to... More >>
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By KARINA LONGWORTH
At the start of Joss Whedon's long-awaited Marvel superhero supergroup flick, The Avengers, the Tesseract—a powerful, potentially dangerous... More >>
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By NICK PINKERTON
At the height of his literary fame, Edgar Allan Poe, who popularized cryptography in his story "The Gold Bug," was so renowned as a code-breaker... More >>
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By MATT COKER
San Clemente's Brent Deal has made his living the past 15 years directing children's toy commercials, but he started out behind the camera on... More >>
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By NICK PINKERTON
Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the... More >>
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By KARINA LONGWORTH
Twentysomething Silver Lake couple Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) talk their way into an unnamed cult that meets in the... More >>
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By MATT COKER
Think back to when you were 13—or, if you're 13, think back to now. Slurping life juice from mama's teat is a faded memory. Volcanic puss... More >>
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By MATT COKER
One asterisk (*) next to a title indicates that film is highly recommended. All other descriptions are based on information provided by... More >>
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By MATT COKER
Apologies for the macabre opening, but the documentary Behind the Orange Curtain was born out of the deaths of Jarrod Barber and Mark Melkonian,... More >>
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By MATT COKER
Erin Gruwell graduated from Bonita High School in La Verne, but her undergrad studies took her to UC Irvine, and she later called Newport Beach... More >>
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By MATT COKER
The Newport Beach Film Festival series of music-themed pictures returns for a second year with a new partner, the OC Music Awards, and a program... More >>
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By MELISSA ANDERSON
I spotted a bottle of something called Marley's Mellow Mood, "a new line of 100 percent natural relaxation beverages," in my neighborhood deli... More >>
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