The English Romantic writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley lived about as cinematic a life as one could, filled with historic achievement, tortuous love, wild sex, radical politics, turbulent family drama, and one devastating personal tragedy after another. That the new film about her early adult years, Mary Shelley, is (according to the overwhelming critical consensus) a […]
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FORD PREFECT: Oh, Zaphod, this is a friend of mine, Arthur Dent. I saved him when his planet blew up. ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX: Oh sure, hi, Arthur, glad you could make it. FORD PREFECT: And Arthur, this is my— ARTHUR DENT: We’ve met. FORD PREFECT: What? ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX: Oh, er… have we? Hey… FORD PREFECT: What […]
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In 1975, Peter Weir’s debut film Picnic at Hanging Rock put Australia’s burgeoning art cinema squarely on the map, on its way to becoming a cult classic. Based on a novel by Joan Lindsay, the film has always had an air of “based on a true story” about it, despite its central mystery being a […]
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The imaginatively titled Book Club, about four women in their late 60s whose love lives are rekindled by reading the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy, sounds like an extended advertisement for the books, but it really isn’t. It’s just the catalyst for an even drearier formula: a story about four old friends that’s basically a dirty […]
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What distinguishes Deadpool from most other superheroes is that he swears, kills people, and breaks the fourth wall. That is also, of course, what distinguished the first Deadpool film from its dozens of siblings way back in 2016. Deadpool 2 grapples with the question all sequels face — what now? — and comes up with the usual […]
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In 2008, 13-year-old Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination for Atonement, a British WWII melodrama based on an Ian McEwan novel about a fanciful girl named Briony Tallis who unwittingly unravels the lives of her sister Cecilia and Cecilia’s lover, Robbie, after accusing him of a crime he did not commit. Ten years later, […]
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Solo: A Star Wars Story opens in a few days, and everyone is supremely excited because making a prequel to Star Wars is a slam-dunk idea that can’t fail. Most fans are content to sit back and wait for the film to open, but true fans know that waiting is for “nerf herders.” Secrecy is […]
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Deadpool came in like a comet in 2016, grossing $783.1 million worldwide — fantastic for any movie, but unheard of for a hard-R superhero movie. Audiences responded to Ryan Reynolds’ Bugs-Bunny-on-meth take on the character, and to the way the film didn’t believe in a fourth wall and poked fun at the superhero genre. But […]
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In Avengers: Infinity War, Josh Brolin is big and purple. His Thanos is the film’s lynchpin and its main character almost by default. Although his quest — to halve the world’s population with a bunch of magical MacGuffins — is fairly conventional for superhero fare, Brolin’s performance is not. Thanos is quiet and focused. He’s […]
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This week’s “good enough, I guess, if you’re not too picky” home-invasion thriller is Breaking In,”which offers the innovative twist of the bad guys getting inside and holding the kids captive while the mom is locked outside and has to “break in,” as it were. What will those geniuses in Hollywood come up with next?! […]
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You’ll think you’ve seen Life of the Party before, or at least something very much like it: A dowdy, newly divorced mom goes back to college to finish her degree — and it’s the same college her daughter is attending! Collision course with wackiness, no? Mom embarrasses daughter, whose friends think Mom is fun; Mom realizes […]
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