Review: Disturbing the Peace

No matter how hard they work, Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, and John Travolta can only star in so many direct-to-VOD thrillers a year, so someone has to pick up the slack. Guy Pearce is that someone in Disturbing the Peace, a cheap, shoddy action movie from director York Alec Shackleton, whose only previous feature (2018’s […]

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Review: 1917

If cinema is, as Roger Ebert famously put it, a machine that generates empathy, the camera is its motor. What a director, editor, and cinematographer choose to show an audience, and the way they choose to frame it, communicates volumes about a movie’s themes and the filmmakers’ position on them. Sam Mendes’ WWI drama 1917 […]

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Review: Three Christs

It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: Three Jesus Christs walk into a mental hospital, each claiming to be the real thing. But there’s nothing funny about Jon Avnet’s dreary period drama Three Christs, which is based on a real-life 1959 study about three paranoid schizophrenics in Michigan who all believed themselves to […]

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Kevin Garnett in Uncut Gems: the Best Athlete Cameo of All Time

The modern cinematic history of athlete cameos begins with a 7-foot-2 “airline pilot” grabbing a kid’s shirtfront like it’s a Kleenex. While no one would ever accuse Airplane! (1980) of realism, there’s a nugget of truth to NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s masquerading as co-pilot Roger Murdoch in the 1980 disaster spoof. In the scene, a […]

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Overlooked ’99: Titus

1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There were countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked gems from 1999 — the weird, ungainly, or […]

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Don’t Forget! 2019 Edition

We had some of our regular contributors suggest movies from this year that flew under the radar or aren’t getting enough end-of-the-year attention. Here they are, in alphabetical order: Climax [Craig J. Clark] The Death of Dick Long [Bill Bria] Fast Color [Josh Bell] Freaks [Audrey Fox] Happy Death Day 2U [Joseph Allen] Jawline [Marshall […]

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