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Ric Review

Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut: Unrated Stanley Kubrick’s final film is at once both confounding and astonishing, telling a story that never makes itself all too clear all for the final moral being pretty simplistic: If you’re married to someone who loves you, you NEVER take it for granted. Cruise is the star of the movie no […]

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Ric Review

Face / Off

Face / Off Sometimes in the world of cinema, a nearly absurd, unbelievable premise can be overcome through the sheer force of actual, literal execution, making a great movie out of something that shouldn’t be and becoming an unlikely classic of its genre in the process. Even then, the multitudes of people who dismiss and […]

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Ric Review

Faculty

Faculty The infathomable skills of director Robert Rodriguez are as such that he could probably make a film adapted from the phone book and it would wind up being fun, wild, and entertaining. To show what he could do with someone else’s material, he took this script from credited writer Kevin (Scream) Williamson that could […]

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Ric Review

Fallen

Fallen As the film began, I immediately steadied myself for yet another retread of the ground covered by Shocker and The Horror Show, as a serial killer jovially heads towards his execution with the promise that he will return to take revenge on the cop who put him away. Certainly I was treated to a […]

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Ric Review

Falling Down

Falling Down A film that literally shocked people out of their preordained conceptions about society in 1993 and twenty years later remains incredibly relevant in the wake of mass shootings and the actions of real life people who have become “fed up” with the way this country works, director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Ebbe Roe […]

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Ric Review

Fantastic Four

Fantastic Four: Director’s Cut After an abortive attempt by Roger Corman in the early 90s to adapt the comic book world’s most famous superhero team, we finally got this big-budgeted effort by Tim Story, the most distinctive feature probably being that it really feels like a film aimed directly at kids with enough special effects […]

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Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer

Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer It appears clear from watching the second (and probably last) chapter of this superhero saga, that director Tim Story has learned from his previous mistakes. Unlike the bloated original, this sequel clocks in at an efficient 91 minutes, with much of the flab and excess material that weighed […]

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Ric Review

Far Out Man

Far Out Man The first thing that must be stated here is that if you are NOT a fan of Tommy Chong or the work he did with Cheech Marin, you’re probably not gonna like this film, Chong’s big “solo project” after the breakup of their legendary comedy team. If you do enjoy his previous […]

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Ric Review

Fargo

Fargo Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a very, very good movie is an overabundance of praise and hype that can actually come from even the most respectable quarters of film analysis and criticism, thus building up an idea of quality for a film that in a first time viewer’s mind is absolutely […]

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Ric Review

Fast Times At Ridgemont High

Fast Times At Ridgemont High Before The Breakfast Club, before Dazed And Confused, before American Pie and the slew of high school comedies and dramas that have come in the years since, this 1982 release marked the first of the films based around American teenage life that did so in a realistic, unsanitized manner, and […]