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Tag: Period Piece (Page 4)

Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta stand close together in a scene from the 1978 film Grease, dressed in 1950s clothing.1950s

Grease (1978) Review

Grease (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A six million dollar musical that took close to four hundred million and never stopped playing. The songs are permanent, the leads are twenty-nine and twenty-three playing seventeen, and…

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Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in a black coat and hat, standing in the dusty streets of Tombstone, Arizona during the 1880s.1990s

Tombstone (1993) Review

Tombstone (1993) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The credited writer was fired a month into shooting, the credited director may not have directed it, and the result is the most quotable Western ever made. Val Kilmer…

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Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in a scene from the 2007 film Atonement, depicting the central characters whose lives are2000s

Atonement (2007) Review

Atonement (2007) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A thirteen-year-old tells a lie and two lives end. The last ten minutes do not reveal a fact, they change what kind of object you have been watching.

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Israeli agents in 1970s Europe during a covert assassination operation, dressed in period clothing in an urban setting.2000s

Munich (2005) Review

Munich (2005) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Spielberg's coldest film and the one that cost him most. A revenge picture in which every success makes the situation worse, and the argument is in the arithmetic.

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A young couple dancing together at a resort, the man in dark clothes and the woman in a dress, circa 1960s setting.1960s

Dirty Dancing (1987) Review

Dirty Dancing (1987) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A film about class and an illegal abortion, marketed as a summer romance. Made for five million dollars by people nobody expected anything from, and still running forty…

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Tom Hanks and a young boy stand together in rain-soaked lighting, the boy looking toward the man in a tense moment. TITLE2000s

Road to Perdition (2002) Review

Road to Perdition (2002) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A gangster film shot like a painting, about a man teaching his son a trade while trying to keep him out of it. Conrad Hall's last work…

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Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson stands in a suit on the Atlantic City boardwalk during Prohibition.2010s

Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014) Review

Boardwalk Empire (2010-2014) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The first three seasons are in my top ten of anything ever put on a screen. Then it degrades, badly. Watch to the end of season three and…

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A formal dinner scene aboard a ship in 1933, with passengers in evening wear seated at tables, revealing the rigid class1960s

Ship of Fools (1965) Review

Ship of Fools (1965) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A German liner crossing from Veracruz to Bremerhaven in 1933, carrying passengers with no idea what they are sailing toward. Vivien Leigh's last film.

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Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot stands on the deck of a paddle steamer, the Nile River and Egyptian landscape visible behind1970s

Death on the Nile (1978) Review

Death on the Nile (1978) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Christie on a paddle steamer with a closed passenger list and a cast of stars. The correct way to film a detective novel, and the only…

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The MS St. Louis ocean liner at sea, carrying Jewish refugees denied entry to Cuba, the United States, and Canada in 1939.1970s

Voyage of the Damned (1976) Review

Voyage of the Damned (1976) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The true story of the MS St. Louis, which carried 937 Jewish refugees out of Hamburg in 1939 and was refused entry everywhere it went. A…

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The bow of the Titanic tilts upward as the ship breaks apart and sinks into the ocean at night. TITLE: Titanic Sinking Scene1990s

Titanic (1997) Review

Titanic (1997) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Cameron built the ship at ninety percent scale, sank it, and hung the oldest story in the world off the side of it. The door problem is real. The…

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F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri in period costume, face showing anguish or concentration. TITLE: Amadeus 1984 Salieri1980s

Amadeus (1984) Review

Amadeus (1984) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Not a biography and not trying to be. A film about a competent man given exactly enough talent to hear genius in somebody else and never produce it himself.

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