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89Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance is so incredible that witnessing it is reason enough to take a look at this movie.
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88The great achievement of Alan Rudolph's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is that it allows us to empathize with Dorothy Parker on her long descent.
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88Mrs. Parker is a comedy even though it's sad, and a sort of tragedy even though it's funny, with such foggy borders between the two that pathos and humor seem to smear all over each other, like makeup running with tears. [23 Dec 1994, p.N]
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88Director Alan Rudolph and producer Robert Altman combine forces to create a quiet, intelligent film about Dorothy Parker.
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88Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a top-notch movie. Everything is in place -- a striking lead performance, solid supporting players, a well-written script, and, above all, expert direction to merge the ingredients.
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80Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle has its flaws, but it also has a heartfelt grasp of what set Dorothy Parker apart from her fellow revelers and makes her so emblematic a figure even today.
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80With his co-writer, Randy Sue Coburn, and composer Mark Isham, director Alan Rudolph has created a sense of time and place that authentically conveys what it might have been like when writers were celebrities and special effects came from words. [10 Jan 1995, p.A18]
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80The movie is inventive, hilarious and, in its own sneaky way, moving.
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80As with many of his films, Rudolph creates an oyster of a work. You need to jimmy a little around the edges before its delicate wonder becomes apparent - which it does, beautifully.[23 Dec 1994, p.36]
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75Though many of Parker's well- known wisecracks make their way into the screenplay, Mrs. Parker ultimately does not give us the Dorothy Parker of legend.
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63Director Alan Rudolph has certainly done his part, leading a colorful parade of Jazz Age editors, essayists and playwrights in arguably one too many directions - easily surpassing The Moderns, his '20s-expatriate companion piece. [25 Nov 1994, p.4D]
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63Alan Rudolph's beautifully burnished, heartache-filled evocation of Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Tablemates bites off a bit more than it can spew. But a couple of things make it special. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]
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63Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a bunch of bon mots in search of a larger theme. Happily, the mots are so very bon that the two hours breeze by quickly enough.
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63Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle directed by Alan Rudolph, a wildly uneven filmmaker who's happily at the top of his form in this offbeat drama.
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60Directed by Alan Rudolph and co-scripted by him with Randy Sue Coburn, Mrs. Parker is a real odd duck of a movie. It seems to have been made both as tribute and put-down. The sporty conviviality of the Algonquin Round Table is celebrated, and yet there's a hollowness to the confabs.[21 Dec 1994, p.4]
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60The movie is as smooth and deadening as a quart of old whiskey, and every bit as depressing as it was meant to be. But why do it at all? [23 Nov. 1994]
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58For a while, the atmosphere seems just right. As Mrs. Parker goes on, it becomes apparent that the one-liners, droll as some of them are, aren't really going to coalesce into characters, scenes, dramatic encounters.
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50Alan Rudolph's 1994 feature about writer Dorothy Parker and the famous Algonquin wits she hung out with in the 20s certainly has its pleasures, but someone should tell Rudolph that, for all his skill and charm, period movies aren't really his forte.
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40Much like Parker's career, the film begins with scintillating flashes of what might have been, but slowly deteriorates into waspish repetition.
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38The film wants to make a case for Parker as the first modern woman. It gets the look and the attitude right, but it can't find her heart.
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30Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film.
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