Screenlife — the screen-capture-style gimmick-turned-medium used in movies like Unfriended (2014) and Searching (2018) — feels like a textbook bad idea. The style was largely pioneered by Russian director and producer Timur Bekmambetov, whose studio, Bazelevs, developed technology to propel production of movies told through laptops, phones, or tablets and has since gone all in churning […]
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In the parlance of rock-climbers, to “free solo” means to climb alone and without a rope — basically, to remove all margin for error. If you make a mistake, you die. What you must keep reminding yourself while watching the documentary Free Solo — about a man training to ascend one of the world’s most challenging […]
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An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is Jim Hosking’s followup to his infamously irritating/amusing The Greasy Strangler, which I enjoyed as a you-gotta-see-this provocation. I was curious to see what else Hosking could do, but it seems Greasy Strangler represented the sum of his skills and interests, because AEWBLL is more of the same, but less so. He […]
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Fans of A Star Is Born are already listening to the soundtrack on repeat, but here’s something new to add to the mix! Warner Bros. has released this demo recording of one of the songs, originally written and performed by Randy Newman. Why they changed the lyrics and style to the version heard in the […]
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The Guilty is a tight, efficient, 85 minutes set in a single location: the 911 call center in Copenhagen. (Except it’s not 911 over there, it’s 112. What a country!) Police officer Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren) is on temporary desk duty taking emergency calls — this is evidently how the Danes punish misbehaving police — when […]
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Lee Israel was a journalist who made a living writing well-regarded biographies before falling on hard times after the failure of her unauthorized 1985 Estee Lauder book, which Lauder undermined by preemptively releasing an autobiography. The excellent Can You Forgive Me?, based on Israel’s own memoir, tells the story of what happened next: Desperate for […]
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Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or MOTCOJCOLDS for short) know Emma Hale Smith, wife of the Prophet Joseph Smith, as a loving spouse who put up with a lot of garbage. Long before her husband was murdered in 1844, she endured the deaths of some of her children, was forced […]
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The 2018 Halloween is a direct sequel to the 1978 Halloween, and it exists in a timeline where there were never any other sequels, not even the one that erased the other ones. Michael Myers killed four people that night (that’s not counting his sister Judith 15 years earlier) and was evidently captured without further incident […]
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In between Jamie Lee Curtis’ stints in the Halloween movies — after her character’s death in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection and before her return in this week’s Halloween from David Gordon Green — Rob Zombie launched a remake series that at first promised a new direction for the franchise but is now treated more like a […]
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The story in Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) concerns a young San Diego couple, Micah and Katie, who set up a camera to document the strange occurrences in their house. On the surface, it’s a horror film about battling supernatural forces — not exactly new ground for the genre. But now, in a different time, […]
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(Full disclosure: The director of this film is the wife of a friend of mine, who is one of the producers. You shouldn’t listen to anything I say about this or any other movie.) Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Little Women gets an update in this affectionate adaptation set in the present day. First-time director Clare Niederpruem […]
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The first Goosebumps movie wasn’t an adaptation of one of R.L. Stine’s tween-horror books but a story about the Goosebumps books, in which Stine (played by Jack Black) had the power to bring his scary imaginings to life merely by writing them. With that established, the sequel doesn’t need Stine (though he shows up anyway, and […]
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