Jordan Peele, the newly minted horror auteur behind Get Out, gives us a lot to process in the early minutes of his follow-up, the suspenseful and more overtly horrific Us. We’re told of a network of underground tunnels in the United States (the “U.S.” of the title?); images of rabbits in cages accompany the opening […]
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One thing you can say for sure about Relaxer: There will never be a gender-swapped remake of it. The story, first juvenile and then surreal, only makes sense in the context of men’s craving for competition and willingness to spend absurd amounts of time and energy on total nonsense. That’s not to say women won’t […]
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J.K. Rowling continues to make waves by revealing details about the sex lives of her characters that were never mentioned in the books or the movies, but there’s a lot more where that came from. As a gay, I have finely tuned gaydar that extends even to film characters. Here are my latest findings and […]
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Captain Marvel may seem to be the action movie event of the month, but for fans of martial arts cinema, there’s a far more exciting film coming to Video on Demand on March 22. Its name is Triple Threat, and it seems tailor-made for action junkies who grew up on a diet of ’80s hard-body […]
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This time last year, Hereditary was already being heralded as the best horror film of 2018 following screenings at Sundance and SXSW. And just one year prior, Get Out was praised as one of the best horror films of all time following its premiere at Sundance. Both festivals often yield some of the greatest horror, […]
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Our ongoing and long-overdue reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment has inspired a new wave of cinema; not only are we seeing more empowering and diverse representations of women and minority groups, but we’re seeing stories that reckon with the root cause of so much of this abuse: toxic masculinity. For centuries men have internalized […]
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The disease in Five Feet Apart, the latest romantic drama about two teens in love where at least one of them has an incurable disease, is cystic fibrosis, and they both have it. They meet in the hospital. Stella (Haley Lu Richardson), our chipper, somewhat obsessive-compulsive, video-blogging protagonist, is in for a “tune-up,” as she […]
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The first image in Ron Howard’s 1994 film The Paper is of gears turning inside an alarm clock. It’s a disorienting start to a movie that’s supposed to be about newspapers. It’s also a signal that this movie (released 25 years ago this week) is as obsessed with time as its characters are with getting […]
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Captive State is geeky, serious sci-fi told with a straight face and no comic relief. This is essential because, like most geeky sci-fi, it’s a hair’s breadth from cheesiness: A few missteps and the whole thing becomes a campy laughingstock. But director Rupert Wyatt, who made the similarly perilous Rise of the Planet of the […]
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The setting of Wonder Park, a goopy pile of trash made by a third-tier animation studio, is an amusement park called … Wonderland. Why isn’t the movie called Wonderland? Probably because there are so many other “Wonderland” movies, most of them Alice-related. So why isn’t the park called Wonder Park? Your guess is as good […]
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Over the past few years coming-of-age films have thankfully moved away from typical male-centric stories about teen boys getting drunk and trying to hook up with girls. The genre has come a long way from American Pie and Porky’s, the casual misogyny of the former and the blatant sexism of the latter. Following in the […]
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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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