Review: Force of Nature

There are so many troubling elements to Force of Nature that it’s tough to know where to begin. Stars Emile Hirsch and Mel Gibson have both behaved reprehensibly (and sometimes illegally) in their offscreen lives for years. The movie’s sympathetically portrayed main characters are cops who disregard the rights and reasonable concerns of everyday citizens […]

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Miami Vice-ploitation: Manhunter, Cat Chaser, and 8 Million Ways to Die

On the night of September 16th, 1984, Crockett and Tubbs cruised a jet-black Ferrari Daytona convertible into pop culture immortality to the tune of Phil Collins’s “In The Air Tonight.” Miami Vice did the impossible – it took MTV seriously. Hill Street Blues veteran Anthony Yerkovich and budding big-screen director Michael Mann tapped into a […]

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Watch This: Welcome to Chechnya

David France is quickly becoming the go-to filmmaker for excellent LGBTQ activist documentaries. France started his directing career with the Oscar-nominated How to Survive a Plague, detailing the AIDS crisis and the story of the activist coalitions ACT UP and TAG in the framework of a thriller. His Netflix documentary The Death and Life of […]

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Review: Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

For 64 years, the Eurovision Song Contest has been an epic annual international extravaganza, pulling together 42 nations to celebrate their cultures and creativity through a music competition that is full of fashion, flare, and fabulous camp. For Europe, it’s an institution, with 182 million viewers tuning in just last year. For Americans, it’s largely […]

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Review: My Spy

One of the big set pieces in Peter Segal’s My Spy is a grade-school art competition, in which our hero, a CIA agent posing as a friendly neighbor, attempts to blend in with the rest of the yuppie parents and relatives. Put on the spot, he starts babbling about how art appeals to his duality; […]

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The Nightmare Visions (and Surprising Emotional Center) of ‘Return to Oz’

It is slightly cynical (but not necessarily inaccurate) to describe Disney’s business strategy for the last decade or so as built, almost entirely, on nostalgia. The “live-action,” sometimes even shot-for-shot, remakes of animated classics like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Cinderella. Series announcements on the streaming service Disney+ that nearly universally […]

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Watch This: Wasp Network

Olivier Assayas’ Wasp Network, out this weekend on Netflix, is an intriguing entry in the prolific auteur’s catalog. This espionage thriller about the Miami Five – a group of Cuban intelligence officers arrested by the U.S. government in 1998 – hews a little more closely to Assayas’s 2010 political thriller mini-series Carlos than his more […]

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Review: Babyteeth

A glance at Babyteeth’s brief synopsis makes it seem like this shattering Australian tragicomedy could be an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. But despite the shared DNA of a gravely ill teen and her bad boy love interest, this feature debut from TV director Shannon Murphy grows into something entirely unlike those treacly romances. […]

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