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Ruby Sparks
RUBY SPARKS is sensitive at every turn, and captures a sort of emotional truth about the nature of identity and even its link to existence itself. Ruby Sparks is a young woman with certain traits, qualities and a rough biography who is invented by an author struggling to equal the success of his bestselling first…
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Take This Waltz
I was a little hesitant about going to this one, even though I like and respect both the actress Michelle Williams and Sarah Polley, the writer/director. That’s because TAKE THIS WALTZ seems on the surface to be another indie movie of an all too familiar type, an earnest little drama about twenty and thirty somethings…
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Émilie
Soprano Elizabeth Futral gave conductor John Kennedy a heartfelt embrace at the curtain call for her solo performance in the Lincoln Center Festival premiere run of ÉMILIE, an opera by composer Kaija Saariaho and librettist Amin Maalouf. With a text culled from letters, notes and other documents, Futral sings the part of Émilie du Châtelet,…
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Trishna
Michael Winterbottom’s TRISHNA is sumptuous. It adapts Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to a contemporary Indian setting and in the process retains the essential beauty of the tragedy while stripping from it the nostalgia and romanticism to which period filmmaking is prone. The past is everywhere in the images – the colonial edifices, the…
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Tango Bar
Thursday evening last was the “grand reopening” of TANGO BAR at Villa Della Pace, where this weekly gathering of tango singers and musicians had for a time been held on Sundays. This was, in any case, my first time out to the event, which emphasizes tango singing of the most down-to-earth, neighborly, unpretentious, and occasionally…
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Buenos Aires Restaurant
If I understood the situation correctly I was, a number of years ago, the first customer at Buenos Aires Restaurant. Excited upon walking down 6th Street and discovering that an Argentine parrilla was about to open in my neighborhood, I jotted down the phone number and called as soon as I got home. It was…
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Savages
On the day I saw SAVAGES, I heard two critics on NPR call it one of the worst movies ever made and read a review in the New York Times that made it sound as if it were touched by poetry. Then I discovered on the app I use to check for show times that…
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Alexandra Castaño Trio
I used to go to the Anyway Café all the time, savoring the house-infused vodkas, excellent martinis made with same, Russian-French bistro food, and classic bohemian atmosphere. But for whatever reason, I fell out of the habit of going there. Until, that is, last Saturday, when the Alexandra Castaño Trio lured me in with several…
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Unforgivable
André Téchiné‘s new film is a subtle and sophisticated work that has the feel of a complex and intricate thriller but without the expected sensational climaxes and revelations. The solutions to the mysteries that arise are more like answers to the questions of life, and sometimes, of course, there are no answers, or at least…
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Americano
AMERICANO is a thoughtful and richly acted film about an inheritance and the psychological issues raised by it. The main character is a French-American with two passports who flies from Paris to L.A. after his mother’s death and ends up in Tijuana looking for a woman, Lola, who may have inherited part of the estate.…