The American – A Movie Review

I couldn’t make any sense out of this film. I swear there is no story whatsoever. Do not let the trailers fool you, there is about 10mins total of action in this film. The bulk of this film is long shots of Clooney, coming to grasp with his life and going about completing his last job. Most “one last job” movies are high-energy action flicks driven by a veteran actor playing a character with a troubled history, but Anton Corbijn’s “The American” operates as a character-driven mood piece, a precise and quiet visual portrayal of a man trying to quit his dangerous profession who is constantly haunted and pervasively paranoid.

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Monster's Ball – A Movie Review

Hank, an embittered prison guard, lives with his aging racist father, Buck, and his own twentysomething son, Sonny. Hank and Sonny work for the local prison where they are preparing the electric chair for a black inmate. After the man is executed, Hank falls in love with Leticia, the inmate’s widow. This emotionally-charged affair forces Hank to re-evaluate how deeply prison work and his father’s infectious hatred have affected his soul.

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About Schmidt – A Movie Review

Warren Schmidt is a retired insurance salesman, who at age 66, has no particular plans other than to drive around in the motor home his wife insisted they buy. He’s not altogether bitter, but not happy either, as everything his wife does annoys him, and he disapproves of the man his daughter is about to marry. When his wife suddenly dies, he sets out to postpone the imminent marriage of his daughter to a man he doesn’t like, while coping with discoveries about his late wife and himself in the process.

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Atonement

In 1935, 13-year-old fledgling writer Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) and her family live a life of wealth and privilege in their enormous mansion. On the warmest day of the year, the country estate takes on an unsettling hothouse atmosphere, stoking Briony’s vivid imagination. Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the educated son of the family’s housekeeper, carries a torch for Briony’s headstrong older sister Cecilia (Kiera Knightley). Cecilia, he hopes, has comparable feelings; all it will take is one spark for this relationship to combust. When it does, Briony – who has a crush on Robbie – is compelled to interfere, going so far as accusing Robbie of a crime he did not commit. Cecilia and Robbie declare their love for each other, but he is arrested – and with Briony bearing false witness, the course of three lives is changed forever. Briony continues to seek forgiveness for her childhood misdeed. Through a terrible and courageous act of imagination, she finds the path to her uncertain atonement, and to an understanding of the power of enduring love.

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Blades of Glory

When rivalry between the world’s best men’s figure skaters – sex addicted, improvisational Chazz Michael Michaels and germophobic, precise Jimmy MacElroy – breaks into a fight on the awards platform, they’re banned from the event for life. Three years later, desire for a gold medal and a careful reading of the rules lead them to compete as skating’s first male-male pair. Can they overcome mutual dislike, limited time to prepare, their coach’s secret past, and the dirty tricks of their main opponents, the Van Waldenberg siblings?

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