How you gonna hire one-legged Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to insect the safety features of your spectacular new Hong Kong high-rise, then let bad guys set the building on fire and threaten The Rock’s family? You think one-legged Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is gonna stand for that? He is not! He will beat the hell […]
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(Screened at the 2018 Fantasia Festival; now playing in U.S. theaters and VOD) The Night Eats the World (“La nuit a dévoré le monde”) has a different mood from most zombie films, which proves to be refreshing. It’s less mayhem-oriented, quieter, more drama than horror (though not without its horror), with a compelling central performance and […]
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“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” This quote is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but its real origins lie in G. Stanley Hall’s 1904 book Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, where it is followed by […]
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I can still feel the weight on my chest as my husband and I left the theater in silence after A Quiet Place. As a parent in general — but specifically as a parent of a little black boy — it felt all too real, this high-stakes world in which merely existing can be deadly […]
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In March, director Peyton Reed told Empire Magazine that his Ant-Man and the Wasp, despite early reports, is “not a romantic comedy,” and that any romantic connection between its title characters (played by Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly) would take a backseat to the action sequences and comedic set pieces. This proved to be true. But […]
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As those still weeping over Avengers: Infinity War will tell you between muffled sobs, there’s big doin’s afoot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But none of that matters in Ant-Man and the Wasp, a direct sequel to Ant-Man that’s just as cheerfully (and fittingly) small in scale, with personal stakes rather than fate-of-the-world stuff and […]
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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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