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- January 7, 1985CINEMABEST OF '84
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- AFTER THE REHEARSAL. A stage director rehearses Strindberg with
- his star pupil and falls a little in love. In this lovely
- "chamber movie" Ingmar Bergman describes his passion for the
- theater with Olympian irony and demon force.
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- L'ARGENT. In his most serene and terrifying parable in a
- 50-year career, French Film Master Robert Bresson cauterizes
- modern France as a society built and run on counterfeit values.
- The moral of this metaphysical slasher movie: greed kills.
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- CAL. With a despairing love affair, a troubled youth and an
- anguished widow kindle a circle of warmth against the
- encircling chill of Northern Ireland's mad terrors. Director
- Pat O'Connor turns their tragedy into a strangled cry from the
- heart.
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- COMFORT AND JOY. Sitcom becomes surrealism in this tale of a
- Scottish disk jockey's miserable Merry Christmas. The best film
- yet from cockeyed visionary Bill Forsyth.
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- ENTRE NOUS. Two young wives (Isabelle Huppert and Miou-Miou)
- feel marooned in the stay-at-home '50s and ignite a
- protofeminist friendship. In this bittersweet comedy,
- Writer-Director Diane Kurys alchemizes anger into understanding.
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- GREMLINS. What kind of monster movie is this? One that dares
- to turn on its own young. Joe Dante's impish summertime satire
- is also a fable that cautions its audience against consuming the
- detritus of pop culture like so much junk food.
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- A PASSAGE TO INDIA. The subcontinent is not merely the setting
- for David Lean's masterly adaptation of E. M. Forster's novel;
- it is its heroically scaled hypnotic central character.
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- PLACES IN THE HEART. A plucky widow saves farm and family in
- Depression America. And Writer-Director Robert Benton
- transcends bathos with his soft-spoken camera poetry.
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- A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY. A gentle old painter (Louis Ducreux)
- tries one summer Sunday to reconcile family responsibilities
- with a renewed passion for his art. In this hugely affecting
- miniature, Director Bertrand Tavernier illuminates the twilight
- of a man's life with the colors of compassion.
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- THE TERMINATOR. Audiences were lured by the giddy premise:
- Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer cyborg from the 21st century.
- They stayed to cheer James Cameron's thriller machine as it
- swanked toward its heavy-metal apocalypse.
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