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100Forman finesses the story's grimmer aspects as he did in "Cuckoo's Nest," and his ability to switch moods on a dime remains unsurpassed.
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100Love proves she is not a rock star pretending to act, but a true actress, and Harrelson matches her with his portrait of a man who has one thing on his mind, and never changes it.
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100The film catches us by surprise in its moving portrayal of the love between Larry and Althea, played by Courtney Love in a performance that glides from kinky abandon to stark tragedy.
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100Raucously entertaining.
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100Forman imbues the material with exactly the right dry, satirical flavor, yet this story is still a Frank Capra little-guy-against-the-system picture.
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100A blazing, unlikely triumph about a man who is nobody's idea of a movie hero. Smart, funny, shamelessly entertaining and perfectly serious too.
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100Courtney Love's performance as stripper Althea Leasure is an amazement. Funny, unfettered and almost scarily alive in front of a camera, she's the definition of a "natural."
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100Enormously entertaining and surprisingly touching.
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90Althea is a ferociously vibrant character, and Love goes all out to infuse her with a wildness seldom seen on screen. Love holds nothing back, and her energy and her heartache energize the movie.
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90Provocative and engrossing.
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90Vastly entertaining.
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88There's a gentleness and open-mindedness in that touch and throughout the film that's a little at odds with the shallower script. But, in the end, that humanity pays. [27 Dec 1996]
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With its fine courtroom scenes, excellent performances, great writing and superb direction it reminds me more than anything else of Barbet Schroeder's "Reversal of Fortune."
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88Tells a good, intelligent story that keeps us interested and involved.
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80I loved it. I'm glad it was made...Film Threat's association with Flynt would sometimes bring gasps of outrage or phones slammed down in disgust. Now, it brings curiosity and even admiration. Kinda weird, huh?
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75Milos Forman's drama is full of outrageous material that will offend liberals and conservatives alike, but it's positioned on the cutting edge of contemporary debates about free speech, feminism, and the effects of mass media on modern society.
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75With "Flynt," Love does what Madonna has been trying to do for 12 years -- create a performance filled with humor, intelligence and soul.
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75The result is good dirty fun, flecked with enough wit to help you overlook the relatively barren characterization.
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70But long after you've grown tired of [Flynt's] escapades, the scenes in which he and Althea support one another against the slings an arrows of outrageous fortune are touching and, ultimately, genuinely tragic.
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70Jogs from one incident to the next, amassing information and dispensing attitude but rarely creating real characters. That's supposed to be director Milos Forman's forte; here, though, nearly everyone is an enemy or a stooge.
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70Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's script may in spots be as much of a skim job as their one for "Ed Wood," but it's almost as sweet and as likable, and if the movie can't ever practice what it and its hillbilly hero preach--the only "beaver" shot in the movie involves a corpse--its heart is certainly in the right place.
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40"Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.
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30In all, this film is a major disappointment with a few powerful highlights.
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30We're really celebrating Hollywood's freedom to create biographies of anyone, no matter how high or low on the social ladder, and still come up with the same banal characteristics, messages and conclusions. In this sense, The People vs. Larry Flynt doesn't champion, so much as squander, freedom of speech.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 8 out of 9
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Mixed: 0 out of 9
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Negative: 1 out of 9
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EvanW.8Flynt is, ironically, moralistic. He stands up for what he believes in and doesn't back down.