You’d be forgiven for thinking The Lighthouse is a comedy when the first two things that happen are Robert Pattinson bumping his head and swearing and Willem Dafoe farting. But while those and a handful of other humorous moments and outlandish events do make this a nutty affair, the sophomore effort from The Witch writer-director […]
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Another one of this week’s unnecessary sequels is Zombieland: Double Tap, a hit-or-miss follow-up to the perfectly good 2009 comedy that brings back the original cast of post-zombie-apocalypse survivors just to put them through the same paces as last time. If the dizzying amount of change the world has experienced in the last 10 years […]
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Once upon a time (wait, actually just this week), Disney released a live-action sequel that literally no one asked for that actually seemed to boast a pretty compelling premise. Hitting theaters just in time for Halloween, and with a perfectly Halloween-ready title to boot, Maleficent: Mistress of Darkness — the sequel to 2014’s Maleficent — […]
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Tell Me Who I Am (on Netflix) belongs to the category of documentaries that are better enjoyed the less you know ahead of time. Netflix is a great home for these, as the 24/7 availability and near-zero cost make it easy to give it a look when a friend texts you saying, “You HAVE to […]
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The attention-grabbing pitch for Jojo Rabbit — a little German boy near the end of World War II has an imaginary friend, and it’s Hitler — is ultimately secondary in importance to the film’s more serious, sentimental themes. That the film, adapted and directed by Taiki Waititi from Christine Leunens’ novel Caging Skies, uses dark […]
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In the Shadow of the Moon (on Netflix) is a reasonably OK science-fiction police procedural that begins with a flash-forward to 2024, where Philadelphia is in ashy ruins and the U.S. flag has been reconfigured to have five big stars instead of 50 little ones. With this indication that The Future will be involved in […]
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We knew on Jan. 1, 2000, that the hysteria surrounding Y2K had been overblown. But before that, the fears that the so-called “Millennium Bug” would cause computers to cease working (or, at the very least, display the wrong date) had engendered a hundred-billion-dollar cottage industry of emergency patches and software upgrades to mitigate a problem […]
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Ever since the proliferation of the mobile phone, horror filmmakers have to go out of their way to explain why their characters can’t use them to get out of whatever horror-movie scenario they’ve landed in. Either someone complains they can’t get a signal – prompting everyone else in the group to whip theirs out to […]
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You’re familiar with the type of movie where a best-of-the-best secret agent is betrayed by his own government and must go on the run. Gemini Man is a very basic one of those with one twist: The assassin sent to kill our secret agent is his clone. Maybe this is on me for not finding clones […]
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The animated reboot of The Addams Family, set in the present day, has everyone’s favorite spooky Goth family (or second-favorite if you were more of a Munsters person) in conflict with a new neighborhood that has popped up nearby called Assimilation, in which sameness is celebrated over individuality. The subdivision is owned (?) by one […]
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It’s a tale as old as time: Married astronaut begins torrid affair with recently divorced co-worker; co-worker breaks off relationship, gets new girlfriend; married astronaut puts on adult diaper to drive 900 miles to Florida (because of course Florida) to confront ex-lover’s new girlfriend, armed with pepper spray. Pour out one glass of recycled urine […]
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The fictional metropolis of Gotham has long been a stand-in for New York City, and with Joker, director Todd Phillips borrows (you might even say outright steals) from several New York movies of the 1970s and early ‘80s that showed the city’s skuzzier side, including The King of Comedy (1983), Taxi Driver (1976), Death Wish […]
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