‘If you think this country’s bad off now, just wait till I get through with it.’ — Rufus T. Firefly, Duck Soup Armando Iannucci’s historical farce The Death of Stalin — which traces the madcap scramble for power between members of Russia’s ruling Central Committee in the days following the titular predicament — has already […]
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Based on the infamous 1969 incident in which a young woman drowned after a probably-drunk Sen. Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge into a pond, Chappaquiddick is unusual for a docudrama in that its point of view is different from its main character’s. Our protagonist, 37-year-old Kennedy (played by Jason Clarke in big white […]
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Movie monsters have always symbolized our hidden fears and desires. It’s impossible to dissociate the hulking behemoth of Godzilla from the atomic bomb and Japan’s perception of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula represented our fear of foreigners in the early ‘30s; the pod people of 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers […]
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It’s laudable to convert harmless childhood games into horror premises, but Truth or Dare does it with such rote blandness that the movie is actually less suspenseful than a real game of truth or dare. Directed by Jeff Wadlow (Cry_Wolf, Kick-Ass 2) from a screenplay credited to him and three other people, the film is meant […]
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Rampage is one of the better video-game-based movies, a low bar that it clears only by forsaking the entire premise of the game. The mid-80s arcade hit had one objective: with a giant gorilla, giant lizard, or giant wolf as your avatar, you destroy every building and eat every civilian you can get your hands or […]
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Howdy, amigos! Looks like the Earth spun around seven times and brought us to another edition of the Friday Movie Pile & Slang Terms for Being Drunk, the long-running weekly feature that is the Internet’s top source for new movie releases and euphemisms for intoxication. Accept no substitutes (unless they’re better somehow)! Rampage (PG-13, 1:47) […]
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As a proponent of the “shut up and watch the movie” school of thought, I have a special fondness for films that actively encourage silence. The tense and thrilling A Quiet Place does it by putting its characters in a situation where making noise is fatal and then making us forget that it’s only a movie. […]
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As a wise woman once said, “All movies are lies and anyone who watches them is a sinner.” OK, she wasn’t so much “wise” as she was “living in an old boat in the woods behind my house,” but it was said by someone and you can’t prove otherwise. Her spittle-firing maxim is certainly lent […]
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It is a time-honored tradition that teens in movies make pacts with one another to lose their virginity, but seldom are those teens female girls of the young lady gender! That makes Blockers different from the typical raunch-com — that, and the fact that it was directed and edited with some discipline and seems to have […]
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A Quiet Place was released this weekend to big acclaim and even bigger box office. The movie is not only impressive for the fact that it’s an original non-franchise horror film that’s largely dialogue free, but that the co-writer and director is none other than John Krasinski of The Office fame. Should we be surprised […]
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It’s the end of the week, so you know what that means: time for the Friday Movie Pile & Pictures of Chris Evans As Captain America! (It may be time for other things as well, but they are of no concern to us.) We’ve provided this same combination of services — a rundown of the […]
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