I’ll say one thing for Crawl, the new gator caper clawing its way into theaters this weekend: It’s rather snappily paced. Clocking in at an easy, breezy 87 minutes, director Alexandre Aja’s film wastes absolutely zero time setting its scaly predators on its unsuspecting victims, who are trapped in a creepy crawl space under their […]
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Is there such a thing as too much genre cinema? If so, then it would likely occur at Montreal’s Fantasia Festival, an over-three week long celebration of the bonkers and brilliant excesses taking place at the exciting edges of filmmaking. The fest’s 23rd edition begins July 11 with a slate of world premieres along with […]
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1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be 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 […]
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As someone who was born a handful of months before the first Toy Story came out, the hit franchise has always very clearly been about one thing: me. Or at least, people like me: kids raised on the sheer optimism of Disney renaissance and peak Pixar slowly learning together what it means to grow up. […]
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Back in 1982, an independent filmmaker named Jenny Bowen made a movie called Street Music, which centered around the working-class long-term residents of a San Francisco apartment building in the Tenderloin. The rent-controlled building — long neglected — gets acquired by a wealthy landlord who aims to “relocate” the tenants (many of whom are elderly […]
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There are a lot of reasons to go after Forrest Gump (1994). It’s a long, unfocused movie about a passive character who nevertheless shapes the course of human history in about 30 different ways. It’s a film without much on its mind, so pleased with its premise that it doesn’t bother to explore it. Twenty-five […]
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If books could always be accurately judged by their covers, the bespectacled, unassuming Ari Aster would be an accountant or an I.T. guy, not the fever-brained lunatic behind the deeply unsettling horror movie Hereditary — my favorite film of 2018 — and its followup, Midsommar, a sunlit pagan nightmare that is (deliberately) less scary but […]
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We didn’t need another X-Men movie. Ever since the raucous pastiche of the original Deadpool and the bloated, redundant X-Men: Apocalypse, it seemed clear that Fox’s mutant movies had run their course. But that didn’t stop another from stumbling into theaters a few weeks ago with the disastrous Dark Phoenix, a film that instantly wore […]
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As a big fat blockbuster superhero movie opening July Fourth weekend, Spider-Man: Far from Home doesn’t quite work. But perhaps that’s because director Jon Watts — along with screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers — have done such an excellent job plotting a cute, low-stakes teen summer romance, Italian style (Gidget Goes to Rome for the […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever else he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) I started covering the Sundance Film Festival for real in 2000, but the year before that I reviewed two movies on assignment for the Utah newspaper […]
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