Toys R Gone. Her smock said “Last of The Toys R Us Kids.” If that was any kind of honor, the cashier didn’t wear it like one. I knew they were closing, but it didn’t sink in until I saw it. The place that enchanted me as a kid more than anywhere else within driving […]
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The question we had when The Purge came out in 2013 was: Wait, how does this work? In this near-future version of America, there’s a 12-hour period set aside each year during which all crime is legal. The result of this planned anarchy is that overall crime rates are low — people are waiting till Purge […]
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If you search the depths of Film Twitter, you’ll discover something about me: I hate everything written by Taylor Sheridan. His films — Hell or High Water, Wind River, Sicario, and Sicario: Day of the Soldado — hearken back to classic cinema, particularly the Western, so it’s disappointing but not surprising that, like most Westerns […]
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Uncle Drew, a basketball comedy directed by Charles Stone III (Drumline, Mr. 3000), ought to be about the title character, a septuagenarian who was the best street-ball player in New York in 1968 before flaming out and disappearing. Played by NBA star Kyrie Irving and a lot of makeup, Uncle Drew is summoned from obscurity […]
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In Sicario: Day of the Soldado, the grim, unpleasant sequel to the 2015 film that grappled with the morality of the drug war, there is no more grappling. What was once an ethical quagmire is now a harmless mud bath, wallowed in by swaggering, non-introspective federal agents who seem to enjoy killing. No one has […]
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Statistics! Who doesn’t love ’em?? We’re going to look at the movies released in the first half of 2018, but let me warn you: There are probably a lot more than you realize. If you want to see a list of every movie released in the U.S. in a particular year, all you have to […]
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Are you tired of social media self-loathing? Well, I have good news: you can re-direct your negative vibes onto ill-fated movie characters who will have you screaming and cursing quietly as they get scorched by horrible summertime decisions. Here are four psychological thrillers — all currently streaming on Shudder — in which morally conflicted individuals […]
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Bad news, everyone: dinosaurs are boring now. People were so preoccupied with whether they could make a fifth Jurassic Park movie, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a direct sequel to 2015’s passable but familiar Jurassic World, is missing nearly everything that made the original so much fun 25 years […]
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The Catcher Was a Spy begins with onscreen titles telling us that after the Nazis split the atom and put Dr. Heisenberg on the job of developing a bomb, the U.S. sent a Jewish baseball player-turned-spy to assassinate him. Color us intrigued! Alas, then the movie jumps back several years to show us what happened before […]
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In 1993, before binge-watching was feasible and when most TV shows were made to be as accessible as possible, a drama series broke new ground, splitting its episodes between heavily serialized “mythology” installments and stand-alone “monster of the week” entries. That show was Chris Carter’s The X-Files, and it was a genre amalgam as well, […]
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Way back in the prolific filmography Steven Soderbergh (whose latest film, Unsane, is out on DVD this week), there’s the tiny Schizopolis (1996), his hilarious, endlessly creative mental breakdown of a vanity project. Full of ideas and self-amusement, It’s best imagined as Soderbergh’s sketch comedy show, as projected straight from his brain. The movie has no […]
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When The Incredibles came out, in November 2004, it was Pixar’s sixth movie and only about the ninth superhero movie in the modern era (which archeologists agree started with X-Men in 2000). Focused more on adventure than comedy, with bar-raising computer animation and starring humans rather than toys, bugs, monsters, or fish, it was a departure for […]
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