Canter Bridge

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The same gentle irony that Karen Blixen brought to the interplay of faith and human experience in Out of Africa is to be observed in full flower in this delightfully quirky film adaptation of her short story called Babette’s Feast. Blixen found the French fathers in Kenya a bit rigid and self-interested, yet she expressed this with kindness and patience. She does the same here with her Lutheran Danes. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

There’s only a handful of words you hope never to catch yourself saying without a due period of reflection: ‘I love you.’ ‘That dress makes you look fat.’ ‘Have you put on a few pounds?’ ‘Nobody will notice.’ (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

Trisha Yearwood has one of the big, bad female voices on the country scene. Better yet, she can work it in a full menu of directions. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

There was a time when it seemed there would be no getting past Celine Dion’s overwhelming voice. Vocal music would end, then and there, along with the 20th century and the millennium. No higher musical peaks worthy of scaling appeared on the horizon. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

Compared to the music Creed later gave us, this debut album must be qualified as a strong start. Understandably, it falls short of the band’s mature sound. (more…)

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Full product information for this item, together with my review, my ranking of the product, and any reader comments, can be found at www.amazon.com.

Comedies don’t get much better than this.

Clooney, Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson are relentlessly hilarious in this loosely Homeric epic of escape from a chain gang in America’s early twentieth-century South. You can love this movie without knowing Homer, of course, though it’s based on that bard’s Oddysey. (more…)

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