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Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Creators: Marty Callner
Starring: The Tampa Bay Buccaneers
The HBO reality series, which follows a single football team through their training camp and preseason, is back for its eleventh year—this time with playoff hopefuls the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
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Emelie
Director: Michael Thelin
Screenplay: Rich Herbeck
Starring: Sarah Bolger, Carly Adams
The latest entry into the “psychotic babysitter” category of horror films is currently sitting at a cool 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Director: David Yates
Screenplay: J.K. Rowling
Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston
They are going to be wringing dollars out of the Harry Potter series until we are old and gray and then long dead. This one, if you didn’t already know, is set in the magical land of muggles and magic-users, but does not feature the boy wizard himself.
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Rules Don’t Apply
Director: Warren Beatty
Screenplay: Warren Beatty
Starring: Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich
Any movie set in the Golden Age of Hollywood is going to, at the very least, be pleasing to the eye. Add in reclusive genius/rich guy/insane person Howard Hughes as played by Warren Beatty and you’ve instantly got something watchable if uneven as this film is.
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Nocturnal Animals
Director: Tom Ford
Screenplay: Tom Ford
Starring: Amy Adams, Jake Gyllenhaal
Tom Ford made the jump from designer icon to very decent director with his film A Single Man and continued that trend with an admirable adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, Tony and Susan. The film looks incredible but the content leaves something to be desired.
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Jackie
Director: Pablo Larraín
Screenplay: Noah Oppenheim
Starring: Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Billy Crudup
For being a two-hour close-up of Natalie Portman’s face, this movie was pretty good. She could have easily carried the film alone, but a rock solid supporting cast certainly helped as well.
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Adaptation.
Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep
Charlie Kaufman films are often befuddling and altogether strange and Adaptation. is no exception. Though the book is loosely based on the novel The Orchid Thief, but never rely in Kaufman for a 1:1 retelling.
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Frost/Nixon
Director: Ron Howard
Screenplay: Peter Morgan
Starring: Frank Langella, Michael Sheen
With all these comparisons to Watergate and Richard Nixon being thrown around about our current President, perhaps there’s no better time than now to refresh our memories about what unchecked power looks like.
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
Director: Peter Webber
Screenplay: Olivia Hetreed
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth
A movie based on a novel based on an oil painting.
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Happy Tears
Director: Mitchell Lichtenstein
Screenplay: Mitchell Lichtenstein
Starring: Parker Posey, Demi Moore
Directed by the son of famed pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and starring two darlings of 90s cinema, Happy Tears focuses on two daughters who return home to care for their ailing father.
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Love Liza
Director: Todd Louiso
Screenplay: Gordy Hoffman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Annie Morgan
The world will never be the same without the genius of Philip Seymour Hoffman in it. In Love Liza, he gives one of his most compelling, if unsung, performances as a gasoline-huffing widower dealing with the suicide of his spouse.
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Martian Child
Director: Menno Meyjes
Screenplay: Seth Bass, Jonathan Tolins
Starring: John Cusack, Amanda Peet
Apart from the title, we have no idea what this movie is about. Is it about an actual Martian child? Or a child that just thinks he’s a Martian? Or maybe he’s just a little confused? Honestly, we just saw that John Cusack was in it and figured it couldn’t be all that bad.
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Max Payne
Director: John Moore
Screenplay: Beau Thorne
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Mila Kunis
Apart from Super Mario Bros., video game movie adaptations are pretty terrible. This one is no different starring everyone’s favorite working-class multi-millionaire actor Marky Mark.
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RocknRolla
Director: Guy Ritchie
Screenplay: Guy Ritchie
Starring: Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson
Guy Ritchie—what happened? After making two of the best crime capers movies of the early-aughts (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch), he got married to Madonna and started farting out duds. RocknRolla is, at the very least, a decent attempt at a comeback but still falls short.
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Sunshine State
Director: John Sayles
Screenplay: John Sayles
Starring: Angela Bassett, Edie Falco
These days, everybody’s so enamored with poking fun at Florida that they miss very decent, heartfelt films set in the Sunshine State like Sunshine State. The film centers on two women trying to save a town from developers but manages to weave in some pretty complex themes.
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Tango & Cash
Director: Andrei Konchalovsky
Screenplay: Randy Feldman
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Kurt Russell
Watched with fresh eyes, this movie is completely bonkers. It’s an unabashed 80s cop film with all the clichés you’d imagine plus healthy insinuations that there’s definitely something going on between the film’s leads.
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The Ring
Director: Gore Verbinski
Screenplay: Ehren Kruger
Starring: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson
Despite spawning some pretty horrible sequels, the original, American-made The Ring was a pretty convincing fright fest with enough visual jump scares to stand the test of time.
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The Strangers
Director: Bryan Bertino
Screenplay: Bryan Bertino
Starring: Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler
“Strangers” torture a husband and his wife in this film, which is kind of like Funny Games (which Netflix will be featuring in August) but without all the cultural subtext.
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Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
Director: Jill Sprecher
Screenplay: Karen Sprecher, Jill Sprecher
Starring: Alan Arkin, John Turturro, Matthew McConaughey
An ensemble drama made during the heyday of ensemble dramas.
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Game of Thrones, Season 7
Creators: David Benioff, D.B. Weiss
Starring: Emilia Clarke, Peter Dinklage
It feels like Game of Thrones jut started and it will already conclude at the end of this month, which is the cruelest joke HBO could pull on anybody. Apparently, next season, every episode will be film length but that remains to be seen (and doesn’t make us feel any better about the series being over after just seven weeks).
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