Really, how long does it take to hammer out a little review? Four minutes? Hahahaha; a private joke, because in the great catch-up effort, the movie in question is Four Minutes. This has everything. The artist as savage beast. Music as savage breast soother. Art as redemption. Sex. Violence. Lesbi...

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I subscribe to three NPR podcasts; Popular Culture, Music, and Science and Medicine. It’s more than I can actually keep up with, because they are generally so interesting that I can’t simply leave them on in the background, as I generally could with Radio 4. So I have to actually listen. Sometimes...

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My friend Rob has unerringly good taste. He has never once given me a totally bum steer, not even Damien Rice. So why did I wait so many months before watching The Edukators (aka Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei)? It is bloody marvelous, a wonderful exercise in small-scale ensemble acting that kept me...

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The truth is, pedantry and non-pedantry can cut both ways. A pedant may vary from a dogged, uninquisitive, cloth-palated follower of orders to a devotee bent on doing everything right; while a non-pedant might be a simply lazy-bones or someone airy-fairily ‘creative’ in the worst, self-applauding...

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I didn’t know Ang Lee had directed oaters before he got to Brokeback Mountain, and having now seen Ride with the Devil, I’m not surprised. Uncannily, there was another film of the exact same title released in 1999. And equally uncannily, Lee’s film recalls every other civil war Southern Gennleme...

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