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January 2, 2013 With his latest film, director Quentin Tarantino was inspired both by spaghetti Westerns and the drama of slavery and the Civil War. The movie is extremely violent — but, says Tarantino, "What happened during slavery times is a thousand times worse. ... If you can't take it, you can't take it."

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January 1, 2013 Actor Jack Black plays a kindly small-town funeral director who murders a millionaire in the film Bernie. Black is also one-half of the comedy folk-rock group Tenacious D. In May, they released an album in the style of heavy metal bands from the 1980s.

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December 29, 2012 Linda Wertheimer talks with Matt Damon, who co-wrote and stars in the new film Promised Land. The movie tells the story of a salesman for a natural gas company who seeks drilling rights in a small Pennsylvania farming town.

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December 28, 2012 Quentin Tarantino's new Django Unchained stars Jamie Foxx as a freed slave turned bounty hunter. The writer and director discusses the film's violence with Audie Cornish and explains why he feels American history can withstand an approach that has more in common with Reservoir Dogs than with Roots.

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December 28, 2012 Day started singing and dancing when she was a teenager, and made her first film at 24. After nearly 40 movies, she walked away from that part of her life in 1968, and started rescuing and caring for animals. Here, she speaks to Terry Gross in a lengthy interview about her career in film and music.

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December 26, 2012 Hyde Park on Hudson tells the story of a love affair between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his distant cousin Margaret "Daisy" Suckley. Historian Geoffrey Ward evaluates the accuracy of the new film and finds it lacking. "It's a very odd film," he says.

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December 24, 2012 Patrick McGilligan, author of Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, evaluates the accuracy of the new Hitchcock biopic starring Anthony Hopkins. McGilligan says much of the film is a "creative and clever fiction" — but that's because "people would rather believe the legend" of the man.

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December 23, 2012 On his last day hosting weekends on All Things Considered, host Guy Raz tells us about the movie he could watch a million times: Richard Linklater's School of Rock. "It's just a perfect movie," he says.

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December 22, 2012 Actor John Hawkes could watch Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life a million times. "I was struck by the darkness of the film," he says.

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December 21, 2012 Over the past quarter-century, millions of people have poured into theaters to see the stage-musical adaptation of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. Now it's opening in movie theaters; director Tom Hooper tells NPR's Melissa Block that it was a total labor of love.

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December 19, 2012 The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami touched people in all corners of the globe. In The Impossible, Naomi Watts plays a tourist whose family is torn apart when the disaster strikes. She speaks with NPR's Melissa Block about waterborne work, and about her own fear of the sea.

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December 19, 2012 In his new film, Sopranos creator David Chase tells a coming-of-age story about Jersey boys in the 1960s who dream of riding the wave of the British invasion all the way to stardom. Chase teams up with Steven Van Zandt — of the E Street Band and The Sopranos — to make the movie's music rock.

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