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It’s hard to believe that Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe have been going steady for than a decade, and if this movie is any sign, the relationship might be going a bit stale.
Robin Hood
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Films featuring
Russell Crowe
Russell Crowe
Gladiator
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Beyond cleaning up at the Oscars, the true lasting impact of Gladiator is that it marks the beginning of the longstanding cinematic “bromance” between director Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. It is also the high water mark for that creative team. They’ve done good work since but not on this level.
3:10 to Yuma
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Unlike the South, the western does seem to rise again. And again and again and again. The genre has been pronounced dead more often than Generalissimo Francisco Franco on Saturday Night Live, but they keep making them. And despite the tendency of the Horse Opera to endlessly recycle plots, this is one of the few explicit remakes I can recall, save for the odd TV movie of the week.
3:10 to Yuma is a movie with its feet in two eras. Continue reading
American Gangster
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With the creative pedigree behind this film, if it had merely been good, that would have been a tremendous disappointment. The writer, director and two stars have no fewer than five Academy Awards between them and none of them earned cheaply. It should come as either no surprise or a great relief that American Gangster more than delivers on every promise made by the names in the credits.
A Good Year
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Suffice it to say I am not a regular consumer of romantic comedies. Most of them seem to offer all the intellectual stimulation of week-old Twinkies. For a movie in this genre to even catch my attention, it has to offer something unique. In this case, director Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe are anything but your typical “RomCom” tag team, so their participation alone is at least worthy of taking note.
Cinderella Man
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Ron Howard has a reputation for excessive sentimentality in his films. I’ll reserve judgment on whether this is deserved for another time, but if it is true, Howard was the perfect director for Cinderella Man. This mostly accurate story of real life boxer James J. Braddock (Russell Crowe) needs a filmmaker willing to yank on the heartstrings like a team of Clydesdales. This film is so consciously old fashioned that it really ought to have been filmed in black and white in the old 4:3 Academy aspect ratio.
L.A. Confidential
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It’s probably appropriate that the film adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential contains a fictional TV series that’s an obvious riff on Dragnet. This film seems like it wants to expose every dirty secret about the LAPD that Jack Webb ever whitewashed.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
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The fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels are not quite as rabid as those of J.R.R. Tolkein, but they are legion. And if Peter Weir didn’t face quite the monumental task that Peter Jackson did when adapting The Lord of the Rings, the obstacles to bringing Napoleonic-era naval warfare to the screen were formidable.
Firstly, he would be filming at least partially at sea and, as Steven Speilberg could tell you from his experience filming Jaws, that’s just asking for trouble. Secondly, the built-in audience for this film would contain a lot of naval history buffs, who would be sticklers for historical detail.