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Reviews

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  Johnny Depp As Family Man In 'Dark Shadows'

  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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  Killing for All the Right Reasons in 'God Bless America'

  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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  'I Wish' for a Miracle Train

  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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  Lit Majors In Love in 'Bonsái'

  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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  'The Avengers' Is Superhero Soup

  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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  'The Raven' Is Not the Poe Drama You Deserve

  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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  Brent Deal Is a Stand-Up Guy

  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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  'Bernie' Features Murder In a Small Town

  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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  Back From the Future in 'Sound of My Voice'

  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 >>

• The Newport Beach Film Festival's Sweet 13

  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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  Newport Beach Film Festival's Social Network

  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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  'Behind the Orange Curtain' and the OC OD Tsunami

  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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  Erin Gruwell Documents the War At Home

  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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  Newport Beach Film Festival's Sounds and Fury

  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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  Roots, Doc, Reggae in 'Marley'

  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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