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March 7, 2013 Swiss director Baran Bo Odar's first feature, the eerie crime thriller The Silence, finds tension in the melodrama of the everyday. A terrible crime repeats itself, and the resulting quiet chaos rips apart a small German town with unsettling force. (Recommended)

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March 7, 2013 A postwar drama wears its history lightly as it tap dances gingerly around actual events in the days after Japan's surrender ended World War II.

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March 7, 2013 Earnest to a fault, this feel-good documentary can't quite mask the commercial cynicism behind the story of the rock band Journey and its up-from-obscurity frontman.

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March 7, 2013 Director Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills has echoes of his earlier (and best-known) drama, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Here he's telling a tale of autocratic religion in a bleak Romanian backwater.

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March 7, 2013 There are some worthy short horror films among the 26 vignettes that make up The ABCs of Death — and some serious clunkers, too.

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March 7, 2013 Disney's new fillm Oz the Great and Powerful aspires to be a definitive prequel to the Wizard of Oz film of Hollywood legend. But as NPR's Mandalit del Barco explains, L. Frank Baum's Land of Oz has been revisited too many times in global pop culture to have one specific look or feel.

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On Morning EditionPlaylist

March 5, 2013 Twisted, violent and occasionally surprising, Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev's American debut aims to be a darkly humorous journey into New York City's underbelly. But ultimately Dead Man Down is just dark, with foreboding cinematography and an overly complicated plot.

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March 5, 2013 There have been quite a number of death notices for romantic comedies issued recently. Can anything save the date movie?

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On Talk of the NationPlaylist

March 4, 2013 In the 1950s, as movie directors were trying to offer TV watchers something they couldn't get on a small screen, Cinerama films threw three simultaneous images onto a curved screen to create peripheral vision. Two classic Cinerama films — This Is Cinerama and Windjammer — are now out on DVD.

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On Fresh Air from WHYYPlaylist

March 4, 2013 On the HBO series Enlightened, a naive corporate executive played by Laura Dern wants to change the world. The series' creator and writer, Mike White, says the show's whistle-blowing plot line was inspired, in part, by his own father's experience.

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On Fresh Air from WHYYPlaylist

March 3, 2013 Actor-writer-director Alex Karpovsky could watch Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love a million times. "I saw it with a friend of mine, and we both absolutely loved it and immediately started quoting it," he says.

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On All Things ConsideredPlaylist

March 3, 2013 Director Roberta Grossman talks about her new film, which traces the evolution of the song that everybody knows — but nobody knows much about — from Jewish folk melody to unmistakable party favorite.

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On Weekend Edition SundayPlaylist

March 2, 2013 Actor David Duchovny could watch Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather a million times. "If I'm flipping around channels, I'll see it's on and I'll say, 'OK, I'll watch it for a scene or two' and then I can never turn it off," he says.

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On All Things ConsideredPlaylist