Director Edward Zwick, recently in San Francisco to promote “Love & Other Drugs,” slightly balks upon trying to identify one or two characteristics common to his varied films, which range from “About Last Night” to “Glory” to “The Last Samurai” to “Blood Diamond.”
He settles on “relationships” and “ideas,” calling “Love & Other Drugs,” which opens Wednesday, a movie that challenges the current Hollywood notion of a romantic comedy.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Where’s that darn figgy pudding?! It may be the holidays, but Tinseltown isn’t offering much tinsel.
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For professional pastry chefs, people participating in bake-offs in the privacy of their own kitchens, and the vast majority of us who simply consume the sweet stuff, “Kings of Pastry” is mandatory viewing.A documentary with more life and suspense than many a swashbuckling saga, “Kings of Pastry” is an unusual, charming, funny, surprising and unexpectedly tense film about the competition for an award that’s the equivalent of the Medal of Honor for chefs.
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Rather than draw out their goodbyes in a single sitting, as Peter Jackson’s Hobbits did in his too-long “Lord of the Rings” finale, Team Harry’s swan song will unfold in two parts, a decision dismissed in some quarters as purely a marketing strategy.
Yet at 2½ hours, the first installment of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” — J.K. Rowling’s conclusion to the saga of an orphaned wizard destined to battle a Hitler-like menace — emerges as the most faithful adaptation in the series.
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His downfall plays like a Greek tragedy, a flawed hero laid low by hubris. It has inspired “Saturday Night Live” skits, the 18th-season finale of “Law & Order” and the hit CBS drama “The Good Wife.” Now the story of the former New York governor brought down by his ties to a high-priced prostitution ring is revisited in Alex Gibney’s “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.”
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The much-anticipated documentary "Waiting for 'Superman,' " which opens in Washington-area theaters Friday, highlights the District's poorly performing public schools and its reformist Chancellor Michelle Rhee while making an urgent case for improving the nation's failing education system.
"Waiting for 'Superman' " shadows five urban students, including Southeast D.C.'s Anthony Black, seeking to escape into charter schools through a lottery system.
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Lindsay Lohan is finally getting her life back on track — and could her romance with Samantha Ronson be back on track too? A new report claims that now that the starlet has cleaned up her act via jail time and rehab, her former lover is ready to give her another chance.
“Lindsay and Sam started speaking as soon as Lindsay got out of rehab. They text constantly,” a pal of the “Machete” star told Life&Style magazine. “It turned into something more, and they’ve secretly hooked up.”
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Conceived 32 years ago as producer Roger Corman’s tongue-in-cheek spin on the “Jaws” formula, “Piranha” returns with a new 3-D gimmick courtesy of director Alexandre Aja, who resurrected Wes Craven’s original “The Hills Have Eyes” with passably nasty results.
The movie requires little explanation.
It’s spring break under siege, as busty coeds lose their tops and then their limbs in graphic enough detail that “Piranha,” deemed too raunchy for Comic-Con, earns its R rating the old-fashioned way.
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Todd Solondz makes harsh, bleak, fearlessly cynical, perversely funny and not entirely unaffecting comedies that depict horrible things people do to each other and the askew ways in which casualties and perpetrators alike continue to tick (and sometimes call it quits) post-infliction.
“Life During Wartime,” his latest release, continues that track. While weaker than “Happiness,” to which it is a semi-sequel, the movie affirms Solondz’s status as a sentimentalist’s nightmare and a solid, distinctive talent.
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It took him the better part of a decade, but producer Dean Zanuck — whose charming new drama, “Get Low,” opens Friday — finally got his men.
After working with original screenwriter Chris Provenzano (“Mad Men”) for three years and eventually recruiting first-time feature director Aaron Schneider to the project, Zanuck, 37, reached out to Oscar-winner Robert Duvall, his first choice to play ornery hermit Felix Bush. Then, he pressed his luck.
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