2010 in Film: Girls With Grit

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The year in film offered a critical mass of girls on fire: self-possessed, irrepressible young female characters played by self-possessed, irrepressible young female actors—girls, as Huck Finn would say, "just full of sand."
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Will You Beat Hagiographers Please Be Quiet, Please?

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The army of Beat hagiographers operates under the illusion that dissecting the personal lives of writers is essential to – even preferable to – understanding their writing.
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Sorkin’s Rapid-Fire May Have Jumped the Gun: Thoughts on ‘The Social Network’

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How can we have perspective on Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26 year-old founder, or the cultural power of Facebook, when the phenomena – both man and network – are clearly still evolving, in both our realities and our collective minds?
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A Stew of Laziness: Ben Affleck’s The Town and the Elements of Bad Drama

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I find with bad movies that usually there comes a point at which I realize that no matter what follows, there's little chance that the film is going to be good.
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Coffee With James Franco

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James Franco was in his own synch, the pleasure of recognition trailing every gesture, consciousness of that pleasure gleaming in his eyes. It was part and parcel to the thrill of his being there, the spectacle of someone who had believed in the love of an imagined audience, the romance of possibility. There was just one thing...
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Remembering Ken Burns’s The Civil War: A Documentary of Difficult Ideas

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By the standards of most “historical” documentaries, The Civil War lacks a certain testicular fortitude. It boasts neither flashy 3-D maps nor live-action re-enactments; what few live shots there are of battlefields were mostly taken after dusk, giving them a surreal, almost dreamlike quality. Its scoring is simple, its narration restrained. It is, well, rather bookish.
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Zen and the Art of Image Maintenance

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Julia Roberts may star in the movie Eat, Pray, Love. But it’s Elizabeth Gilbert who’s turning in the performance of a lifetime.
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Staff Pick: This is England

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At the start, the film's world is shaped by Thatcher and the Falklands and council housing and having no money; the youth, as is their wont, are acting out and wearing silly clothes.
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“Baster” and The Switch

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Adapting a short story is a different animal from novel-to-movie adaptations, as both stories and movies are meant to be consumed in one sitting. Jeffrey Eugenides' “Baster” is a good opportunity for an adaptation; it’s funny, with a high-concept plot, and it’s not impressionistic or experimental.
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Death in Venice? Don’t Look Now

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A movie possesses a literalness that a truly good piece of fiction doesn’t, or shouldn’t. Because we can’t, in the first instance, flip back to an earlier scene, and because it’s presumed that we’re seeing this movie for the first time at the cinema, we experience it as one continuous unspooling of narration.
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V: Lizard Aliens as a Social Reminder

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We live in a world where history repeats itself; where old ideas cloak themselves in various contemporary skins and pretty packages for each budding generation.
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Navigating the Turbulence of “Up in the Air”

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If you ascribe to the notion that, more than anything, great art disturbs, Reitman has indeed crafted something lasting.
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Tiny and Strange: Reinterpreting Alice

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Perhaps Lewis Carroll's original story worked because it wasn't about what it meant to be a woman at all. Instead, it was about a particular girl and her particularly curious adventures into a world of nonsense so unique there still hasn't been a film version which has really done it justice.
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The Best Picture Wins Best Picture

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My hope, in the end, is that the incessant hype around Avatar didn’t simply annoy voters until they voted against it, out of nothing more than spite.
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The Audience, The Accused: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon

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Already the winner of the Golden Globe, the The White Ribbon should win the Oscar, which considering director Michael Haneke’s anti-Hollywood stance, may surprise some viewers.
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Happily Ever After: Husband and Wife discuss “The Bachelor”

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My question to you is why does "The Bachelor" -- a show with a largely female audience -- continue to enforce these sexist stereotypes of what a women can (and in some cases, should) be?
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Father, Son, and Silver Screen: David Gilmour’s The Film Club

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With a novelist's attention to detail and a film buff's ear for dialogue, this is a gripping tale of a father and son.
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Brodsky’s Cat: Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s A Room and a Half

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A Room and a Half not only allows for the fictional Brodsky’s particular nostalgia, but seems to suggest it as the indispensable poetic impulse.
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