(On HBO.) Little had to be changed about the plot of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son to make it work with an adaptation set in the present, but something must have been lost in translation. As directed by first-timer Rashid Johnson (a respected Chicago artist) from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks (Girl 6), the story’s […]
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The title character in Hotel Mumbai is actually called the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, or the Taj for short, and it was one of a dozen Mumbai locations attacked by Islamic terrorists on November 26, 2008, ultimately killing 174 people and injuring hundreds more. The film, directed by first-timer Anthony Maras, follows the disaster-movie formula as […]
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The whole point of Pet Sematary — both Stephen King’s 1983 novel and the effective 1989 movie version — is that you shouldn’t revive the dead because they won’t be the same when they come back. (It’s one of those universal, timeless messages.) So it’s a little on the nose that the new adaptation, directed […]
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Despite their adventures ostensibly being aimed at kids, most superheroes aren’t children themselves. Except for the Spider-Men and occasional moments with the younger X-Persons, we rarely see a superhero revel in the sheer delight of having awesome powers. So part of what makes Shazam! a treat is that the hero is a 14-year-old boy, Billy […]
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The latest film to earn the distinction of being #1 at the box office and universally disliked is Dumbo, from Disney, the studio that’s usually responsible for highly successful movies that everybody hates. How did this happen? Well, we snuck into the Disney offices a few years ago and planted a microphone in the giant […]
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Spoilers for Us. For most in the film business, marketing is simply a tool, a way to let potential customers know about a product being sold. There are a few filmmakers, however, who have control over their marketing materials and, rather than just use them as advertising, make them an extension of the experience of […]
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The title character in The Beach Bum, a stoner-poet named Moondog, is the part Matthew McConaughey was born to play, and he is indeed at his McConaughey-est here: grinning, giggling, pontificating, publicly urinating, stumbling hazily from one party to the next, just generally living his best life. But the film is written and directed by […]
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The self-cannibalization at Disney continues with Dumbo, a turgid, labored, bloated live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with precisely none of the original’s emotion, charm, or joy. Why do these things that are obviously bad ideas to begin with keep turning out so bad? It is a mystery. Directed by a somewhat toned-down Tim […]
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Coming-out stories have become common enough that movies are starting to tell them with nuance. The “Am I gay?” question no longer has only two possible answers; there’s a whole spectrum, as 17-year-old Franky Winter (Josh Wiggins) discovers in Giant Little Ones, a discreet and decidedly un-salacious drama from Canadian filmmaker Keith Behrman. Franky is […]
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Since the dawn of that guy who tried to cut all women out of The Last Jedi, we’ve entered a new era of fandom. An era of thankless course correction, where anyone with a childhood sculpted by a certain piece of art gets to tell the artist how it really belongs to them, and they […]
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Twenty years ago, Katarina Stratford — played by the inimitable Julia Stiles — blasted Joan Jett’s “My Reputation” from the speakers of her 1964 Dodge Dart; Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona danced across stadium bleachers belting Frankie Valli’s “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”; and a generation of adolescent girls found their new role model […]
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An apocalyptic event happens so subtly in Starfish that you almost don’t notice it. The reasons for that are probably more practical than artistic — it costs money to show widespread devastation — but it adds to the intrigue of this melancholy sci-fi drama, which can feel both realistic and dreamlike, even in the same scene. […]
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