Review: Big Time Adolescence

“I know this seems bad,” Mo explains, as the police officer leads him out of his high school classroom. “But it’s not entirely my fault.” It’s important to set the proper tone, and establish the dominant themes, early on in your motion picture, and Jason Orley’s Big Time Adolescence certainly does that; in this introductory […]

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Review: The Hunt

Exploitation movies are quick, dirty, gory fun. They’re also usually in questionable taste, which is part of their lowbrow entertainment value. You don’t watch VFW or Hobo with a Shotgun or even Brawl in Cell Block 99 for trenchant socio-political commentary. You watch these movies because nasty, well-executed action is thrilling to watch, and self-aware […]

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Crooked Marquee’s True/False Film Fest 2020 Diary

The True/False documentary film festival is like Disneyland for non-fiction filmmaking. For one weekend every year, the small college town of Columbia, Missouri becomes a magical place where anything is possible. Renowned filmmakers rub elbows with college students, bartenders and farmers. High school science teachers break out their craziest outfits to help organize lines of […]

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Review: Onward

With each new Pixar release, there’s a temptation to immediately see where it ranks. How does it stack up to The Incredibles’ sophistication and style? The Toy Story movies’ tender love for childhood and appreciation of growth? Inside Out’s ability to make you cry floods of heartfelt tears from its opening seconds? Onward probably fits […]

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Review: First Cow

Typically, the heroes of Westerns are rugged cowboys, bombastic outlaws, or noble sheriffs. They are men with a sneer on their lips and a gun on their hip. They are power fantasies that make the Wild West seem like a grand adventure, gladly glossing over the mundane menaces of living outside civil society. Like where […]

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Review: Escape from Pretoria

The inmates who break out of Pretoria Central Prison are imprisoned for their political activities, but the context is mostly irrelevant to Francis Annan’s Escape From Pretoria, which is far more interested in generating suspense and painstakingly chronicling procedural details than in delivering a social message. Based on the memoir by South African anti-apartheid activist […]

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