I didn’t grow up with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (or Sesame Street, for that matter). We didn’t have cable yet when I was that age, and our TV antenna didn’t pick up the local PBS affiliate. Yet even without a personal connection or a sense of nostalgia, I had a lump in my throat for most of […]
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Four movies deep and 20 degrees down, my brother and I were the last ones left at the Aut-O-Rama Twin. The only other survivor — a hardy family piled in and around a pickup truck — must’ve bailed while I was in the bathroom. When I shambled out of the brick bunker, under the red […]
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Would you like to watch Toni Collette have a nervous breakdown for two hours? Hereditary is many things — a haunting story about a disintegrating family, a masterfully directed nightmare by first-timer Ari Aster, a pants-besoiling horror film — but it’s also Collette’s highlight reel, full of intense emotions and monologues that she performs with devastating […]
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Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach and the movie based on it (which he also wrote) tell a story set in 1962 England that could only work as a period piece, for it is based on the premise that society expects newlyweds to be virgins, and that many of them actually are. The big-screen debut of […]
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Remember the Robert Redford movie All Is Lost, where he was stranded at sea? Adrift, with teen-romance veterans Shailene Woodley (The Fault in Our Stars) and Sam Claflin (Me Before You) lost in the Pacific on a storm-damaged yacht, is like that, only boring. It’s based on real events recounted in Tami Ashcraft’s book Sky […]
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If the absence of Johnny Knoxville’s Jackass has left a concussion-shaped hole in your life, it may be partially filled by Action Point, a juvenile comedy with Knoxville as the owner of a rickety amusement park who tries to compete with a fancy new park by embracing what makes his unique and removing all the safety […]
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Upgrade is an offbeat futuristic techno-thriller in the tradition of B-movies about scientists tampering in God’s domain, made with enthusiasm (by Saw and Insidious creator Leigh Whannell) from the spare parts of other sci-fi stories. It has some clumsy dialogue and melodrama, but it also has enough tongue-in-cheek ingenuity and kinetic energy to compensate for it. We are […]
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Given his scene-stealing work as Lando Calrissian in Solo: A Star Wars Story and the artistic poignancy of his masterwork music video “This is America,” it should surprise no one that when Donald Glover made his film debut in the very silly indie Mystery Team (2009), he was the MVP. As one-third of Derrick Comedy, […]
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“This is not based on a true story,” say the onscreen titles at the beginning of American Animals. “This is a true story.” A bold assertion, but writer-director Bart Layton, whose previous film was the unbelievably engrossing documentary Impostor, makes a strong case for himself with his narrative debut, an account of a 2004 incident […]
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This month saw the passing of Philip Roth, as important — and no less controversial — a figure to the field of literature as Ty Cobb was to baseball, or Pablo Picasso was to painting. Considered by many to rank among the greatest American novelists of all time, Roth also accumulated a large share of […]
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The neo-noir was a genre closely identified with the ‘90s. By 1998, though, neo-noirs were a dime a dozen, with directors and screenwriters trying numerous ways to infuse something new into their takes; many tended to up the salaciousness factor in the hopes that titillation would bring in audiences. But in the case of Don […]
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