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100One of the year's best films for a lot of reasons, including its ability to involve the audience almost breathlessly in a story of mounting tragedy.
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100Lean, elegant, and emotionally complex -- a marvel of backwoods classicism.
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100In one of the sweetest ironies of the entire film year, Sam Raimi has made an A-movie with the soul of a B-movie classic.
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100But [Raimi]'s instructed his fabulous Style to take a hike, and, working from Scott Smith's brilliantly reconfigured script from Smith's own (much darker) novel, delivers a piece that is severe and disciplined in its evocation of the cold terrors of fate.
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100With elegant, clockwork construction, Smith has transplanted his novel of greed, betrayal and getting what you deserve to the screen, where it is told by director Sam Raimi with a spareness befitting the whiteness of its snowed-in setting.
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90Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.
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90As straightforward in narrative as it is gut-wrenching in effect, A Simple Plan is a sort of slow-motion skid down an icy blacktop— it's a movie you watch with a mounting sense of dread...[It's] an extremely credible thriller and an affecting brother-story.
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90An unleashed Raimi may be a more exciting moviemaker, but there's something to be said for the virtues of a good story well told, which describes A Simple Plan down to its last shivery snowflake.
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90When you get the shivers watching this wintry tale unfold, it won't be from the cold.
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90Money Can't Buy You Happiness. It hasn't been this vividly re-examined in decades, and we're the richer for it.
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88Generates genuine tension because it's propelled by actual human feeling, which, these days, turns out to be a surprisingly thrilling prospect. [11 Dec 1998]
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88It's a Master "Plan."
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88The plan in A Simple Plan grows exponentially complex once the first dollar is purloined, an act that makes this unpretentious parable one of the season's better 'what's-going-to-happen-next?' movies.
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88The characters are at the heart of A Simple Plan, and the gruesome complexity of their interaction elevates this film to the level of a midwinter treat.
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PatrickDunne10