Friends, critics, countrymen, I come to offer faint praise for Ophelia, not to bury her. See? Lifting from several of Shakespeare’s greatest works is pretty fun (and kind of sloppy). Just ask Australian director Claire McCarthy (Little Hands, The Waiting City) and Canadian screenwriter Semi Chellas (whose credits include a few indies as well as […]
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You know him — there’s one of him in every circle of loose acquaintances: the guy (or gal or nonbinary pal — gender is irrelevant here) who has made worshipping The Beatles part of their personality. Despite being born at least a decade after the band parted ways, he knows all of the lyrics to […]
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It has escaped few moviegoers’ notice that within the last week three movies about sentient dolls have been released: Toy Story 4, Child’s Play, and Annabelle Comes Home. Given the chaotic nature of multiplexes and the incompetence of parents, it’s easy to see how confusion may arise. And so, in response to an emergency request […]
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Annabelle Comes Home is part of the Conjuring franchise, but you don’t need to have seen any of those movies (which also include The Nun and The Curse of La Llorona) to understand what’s going on here, which is that there’s a creepy doll that isn’t possessed per se but that is a conduit for […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) In terms of lasting, positive impact, 1964 was a watershed year. The Civil Rights Act was passed, officially (if not yet literally) ending segregation. The Beatles and […]
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Toy Story 3 was such a perfect culmination to the series that any Toy Story 4 is going to be met with wariness. The Toy Story 4 we got does nothing to allay those concerns — it is, as expected, an unnecessary addition, though I do like where the characters all end up — and it’s […]
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Noted French pervert Luc Besson (The Fifth Element, Lucy) is back with another story of a badass woman who happens to be everything a horny screenwriter could want her to be — avidly bisexual, eager to sleep with men she works with, doesn’t talk a lot — in Anna, a loopy chunk of Eurotrash starring […]
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There’s something different about Chucky in the new Child’s Play remake. Originally birthed as a very creepy-looking killer doll possessed by the spirit of a wise-cracking fugitive serial killer through some sort of very un-P.C. voodoo magic in the mean, lean 1988 film of the same name, the 2019 Chucky (voiced by Mark Hamill) is […]
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Who gets to make country music? Who gets to define what’s authentic and what’s appropriative? These questions have dogged alt-country — itself a reaction to pop-country pablum that’s taken over the mainstream — since its early ’90s rise. Forget what the gatekeepers would have you believe: The runaway success of singer-songwriters like Gillian Welch (a […]
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It’s no secret that a biopic is the surest route to Oscar love. Academy voters need only catch a glimpse of artfully applied facial prosthetics and hear an actor’s best impression of a historical figure, and they’re swooning. But considering how critically well-regarded and frequently made biopics are, it’s shocking how many of them wildly […]
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(Editor’s Corner is where Eric talks about overlooked gems, film history, or whatever he wants to talk about because he’s the boss and no one can stop him.) Have you ever seen the movie where King Arthur and Henry Higgins (or, if you prefer, Mark Antony and Julius Caesar) play a bickering but affectionate old […]
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