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- CINEMA, Page 94BEST OF '88
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- AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS
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- Tragedy awaits, irony abounds in this memoir of friendship
- and betrayal in a boarding school during World War II. Without
- italicizing a single emotion, French director Louis Malle has
- created the year's strongest indictment of the totalitarian mind
- and the conformist soul.
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- BABETTE'S FEAST
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- Cooking is a metaphor for art in Gabriel Axel's wise, deeply
- ironic and richly realized adaptation of Isak Dinesen's story.
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- BEETLEJUICE
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- The feel-weird movie of '88. Director Tim Burton's
- supernatural jape features comic-book ingenuity, a swell turn by
- Michael Keaton as a punk demon, and a delirious calypso sound
- track. Day-O will never sound the same.
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- BIRD
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- Charlie Parker, genius of modern jazz and modern
- self-destruction, is played with easy-gliding perfection by
- Forest Whitaker, and director Clint Eastwood re-creates his
- world in dark, romantic hues. No false notes, no easy sentiment.
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- THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST
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- In an age of post-Christian facetiousness, Martin Scorsese's
- work daringly attempts to restore passion and melodrama to the
- Gospel story. Protests notwithstanding, the film is an
- affirmation of faith in the power of both the Gospel and the
- movies.
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- MISSISSIPPI BURNING
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- Historical fact, the murder of three civil rights workers in
- 1964, triggers a fervent historical fiction. Gene Hackman is
- canny and powerful as an FBI agent tracking the killers in
- director Alan Parker's angry, headlong film.
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- PELLE THE CONQUEROR
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- An old man and his son on a Danish farm: sweet, stern,
- elemental, grand.
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- THE SINGING DETECTIVE
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- Dennis Potter's BBC serial, about a writer lacerated by
- memory and liberated by fantasy, was an instant cult classic on
- TV. Now it has barreled onto the big screen -- all 6 hr. 42
- min. of singing, dancing, dazzling talking. In either format,
- a bloody masterpiece.
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- TUCKER
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- Francis Ford Coppola restores Capraesque would-be capitalist
- Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges) to legendary life in a
- funny-dreamy biography of the can-do automaker who discovered
- that prophets often end up without profits when they threaten
- the economic establishment.
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- WINGS OF DESIRE
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- An angel, whose job it is to listen to the cries of human
- misery, falls to earth and falls in love. This astringent
- romantic fairy tale, from director Wim Wenders and novelist
- Peter Handke, imagines a West Berlin languishing in heartache
- and itching for spiritual redemption. It's funny too.
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