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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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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