The Twilight Saga’s second installment finds Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) feeling pretty good –- or at least a little less broody — about the state of things after having ironed out some of the finer points of interspecies dating. Naturally, it doesn’t last long. Bella’s 18th birthday party turns into a bit of a fiasco when Edward’s brother nearly kills Bella in a fit of bloodlust. It’s an awkward situation, to be certain, but while Bella is willing to forgive and forget, Edward elects to leave town -– permanently. The decision sets off a chain of miscommunications that lead to, among other things, cliff diving, a visit with vampire royalty, a supernatural love triangle, and a close call with a scorned vampire (Rachelle Lefevre) whose mate met a gory end at the hands of the Cullens.

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A director renowned for ornately crafted set decoration and meticulous framing, Wes Anderson didn’t surprise anybody by taking on a stop-motion animated project — where literally every shot could be composed of a zillion perfectly composed still photographs. And, indeed, Anderson’s 2009 opus Fantastic Mr. Fox (based on the children’s book by Roald Dahl) proves to be as perfect a fit for the auteur as fans were hoping.

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Pedro Almodóvar has never been afraid of playing with timelines, and his ability to articulate how the past holds sway over the present infuses his work with a noir-like sensibility. Broken Embraces not only continues this exploration of guilt, and how it weighs on relationships, but also feels more personal than many of his other works.

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Based on the remarkable true story of Michael Oher, as chronicled by Michael Lewis in his nonfiction book of the same name, John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side offers an overly familiar formula delivered with a commendably restrained amount of melodrama.

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With Defamation, award-winning documentarian Yoav Shamir abandons the straightforward style of his powerful Checkpoint for something more freewheeling and personal. The filmmaker’s wryly amusing persona is front and center in Defamation, and he’s disarmingly coy enough that the documentary’s power sneaks up on you. Anti-Semitism is, of course, especially fraught subject matter, but after a few forays to find evidence of it on the streets of New York City, we come to discover that Shamir’s subject matter isn’t the phenomenon itself so much as anti-Semitism’s use as a way to rally uncritical support for the state of Israel.
 

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Is it possible to write a raving two-star review? With this bewildering chimera of a movie, Werner Herzog has proven that he is incapable of making a boring film. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans succeeds brilliantly as failure, as Herzog and the terrifically inept Nicolas Cage manipulate the conventions of the police genre for their own personal amusement, foregoing the standard tedium of inflated narrative tension and score-driven suspense in favor of moments of delirious dissonance and peculiar humor.

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The trick to crafting a good children’s movie is to create a film that captures the imagination of young viewers while simultaneously transporting parents back to that time in their lives when anything seemed possible. When filmmakers strike that perfect balance, it’s like they’re bridging the gap between childhood and adulthood by eliminating the skepticism and cynicism of grown-ups, and gently teaching young ones a little bit about how the world really works. It’s obvious that the filmmakers behind Planet 51 worked diligently to create a film that speaks to audiences of all ages, but while the concept of a human space explorer landing on an extraterrestrial world resembling our own 1950s society is ripe with possibilities, their choice to go the conventional route results in a film that’s technically accomplished, yet aggressively generic.

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Comedy has always been about cruelty to some extent — after all, the pratfall, the pie in the face, and the insult are three of the oldest and most reliable laugh-getters of all time, and they all involve robbing someone of their dignity for the amusement of others. But the notion of the prank as entertainment doesn’t have quite the same history; while funny stories that involved tricks played on others have been common enough through the history of literature, theater, and filmmaking, it wasn’t until Allen Funt created the TV series Candid Camera for the fledgling ABC network in 1948 that someone struck upon the idea of tricking someone into making a fool of themselves purely for the purposes of getting a laugh. Since then, the prank as folk art form has been firmly established. Ashton Kutcher dressed up Candid Camera in a trucker hat and an ironic ’70s rock band T-shirt, called it Punk’d, and made it a hit all over again.

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