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Rob Nelson

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Life's Second Act

Graphic artist Mike Mills starts something new with Beginners.

By Rob Nelson
Jun 22, 2011

Playing an emotionally asphyxiated illustrator whose cancer-stricken dad comes out of the closet at age 75, Ewan McGregor looks positively yummy in Beginners, a gay-is-okay dramedy from the distributor that brought us The Kids Are All Right. In fact, this semiautobiographical movie by SoCal skater-boy-turned-graphic-designer-and-filmmaker Mike Mills has no shortage...
The Woman Behind the Fascist

Il Duce's scorned secret first wife gets hers in Vincere.

By Rob Nelson
Apr 14, 2010

Particularly since Benito Mussolini came to power as a newspaperman, let us not bury the lead: According to Marco Bellocchio's Vincere, the fascist dictator was nearly as much of a bully in the bedroom as he was in office. Il Duce would eventually get busy with the Pope, but in...
False Prophet

No visionary he, the "French Scorsese" arrives stateside with his '70s-style gangster epic.

By Rob Nelson
Mar 10, 2010

Agreeing at the insistence of a Corsican mob boss to suck and then slash a fellow inmate, newly jailed Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) —poor, illiterate, a "dirty Arab" in the prison's racist pecking order — gets what's coming to him, but in a good way. Indeed, crime pays in...
Blind Faith

Pedro Almodóvar still believes in Pedro Almodóvar.

By Rob Nelson
Dec 23, 2009

"Equal parts comic melodrama and film noir, and twice as fun as it ought to be, Broken Embraces boasts more bifurcations than any two Hitchcock classics. Channeling Audrey Hepburn, Almodóvar muse Penélope Cruz plays Lena, a Madrid secretary who moonlights as a hooker named Severine before turning full-time to (what...
The Devil Came on Horseback

War, slaughter, genocide — and you feel like seeing a movie?

By Rob Nelson
Sep 12, 2007

For an issue-oriented doc with activist aims, the line between hope and despair — between placating an outraged audience and calling it to action — is a fine one, indeed. Any indie auteur feels tempted to salute grassroots heroism, his own not least, although the promise of "making a difference"...

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