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Lust, Caution

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  • Title: Lust, Caution
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One of my favorites from the extremely strong slate of films released in 2007, director Ang Lee‘s Lust, Caution earned praise winning Lee his second Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival but also backlash for the film’s explicit sex scenes causing it to be released in America under a NC-17 rating. Loosely inspired by an attempt to kill a Japanese collaborator during WWII, Tang Wei stars as the most naive member of a group of radicalized college students who plan to kill a collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) set in power by the Japanese occupation in China.

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Nine Guests for a Crime

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  • Title: Nove ospiti per un delitto
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The 1977 giallo film, an Italian subgenre featuring both murder mystery as well as slasher and thriller elements, offers up 9 rather unlikable members of a dysfunctional rich family who start being killed off one by one when they gather at their family villa on a private island far removed from the prying eyes of the rest of the world. The family of the authoritative Ubaldo (Arthur Kennedy) include his disturbed sister Elisabetta (Dana Ghia), his second wife Giulia (Caroline Laurence), and his children Lorenzo (John Richardson), Michele (Massimo Foschi), and Patrizia (Loretta Persichetti) and their their mix of oversexed or frigid spouses Greta (Rita Silva), Carla (Flavia Fabiani), and Walter (Venantino Venantini).

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Arabesque

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  • Title: Arabesque
  • IMDb: link

Hitchcock-lite, director Stanley Donen‘s 1966 spy thriller Arabesque stars Gregory Peck as a college professor in over his head after being pulled into a world of intrigue involving an Egyptian cypher which killers, the government, and foreign officials all want translated. For a film that doesn’t do anything great, other than properly framing Sophia Loren as the film’s femme fatale whose true loyalties are always in question, Arabesque is only mildly diverting.

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The Thing

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  • Title: The Thing (1982)
  • IMDb: link

Flashback Friday takes us back to the icy tundra and a new battle for survival against an alien from another world. Director John Carpenter‘s adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.‘s novella Who Goes There? stays closer to the source material than The Thing from Another World. Set in Antarctica, our evil invader from outer space had already been thawed by a group of Norwegian scientists, the last of whom are chasing an infected dog to the American outpost. Killing the out-of-control foreigners, our team of protagonists will have to piece together how the story began not realizing the cute sled dog they’ve just let into their camp could very well mean the death of them all.

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The Thing from Another World

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  • Title: The Thing from Another World
  • IMDb: link

Throwback Thursday takes us back t0 1951 and the North Pole where a group of soldiers and scientists will unearth an alien from another world from beneath the ice that almost destroys them. Making several changes to the novella which spawned it, the film is your basic fight for survival at the end of the world that even pits some of the humans against each other involving the scientists, oblivious to the dangers involved, who want to capture and keep the creature alive, and the soldiers who know it must be destroyed.

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