Bad news, everyone: dinosaurs are boring now. People were so preoccupied with whether they could make a fifth Jurassic Park movie, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a direct sequel to 2015’s passable but familiar Jurassic World, is missing nearly everything that made the original so much fun 25 years […]
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The Catcher Was a Spy begins with onscreen titles telling us that after the Nazis split the atom and put Dr. Heisenberg on the job of developing a bomb, the U.S. sent a Jewish baseball player-turned-spy to assassinate him. Color us intrigued! Alas, then the movie jumps back several years to show us what happened before […]
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In 1993, before binge-watching was feasible and when most TV shows were made to be as accessible as possible, a drama series broke new ground, splitting its episodes between heavily serialized “mythology” installments and stand-alone “monster of the week” entries. That show was Chris Carter’s The X-Files, and it was a genre amalgam as well, […]
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Way back in the prolific filmography Steven Soderbergh (whose latest film, Unsane, is out on DVD this week), there’s the tiny Schizopolis (1996), his hilarious, endlessly creative mental breakdown of a vanity project. Full of ideas and self-amusement, It’s best imagined as Soderbergh’s sketch comedy show, as projected straight from his brain. The movie has no […]
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When The Incredibles came out, in November 2004, it was Pixar’s sixth movie and only about the ninth superhero movie in the modern era (which archeologists agree started with X-Men in 2000). Focused more on adventure than comedy, with bar-raising computer animation and starring humans rather than toys, bugs, monsters, or fish, it was a departure for […]
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Tag turns an outrageous-yet-true story into one that’s just outrageous, with details that couldn’t possibly be true. Based on a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, it’s about five men in their late 30s who’ve been playing the same game of Tag since grade school in Spokane. The game is operative only in the month of […]
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The horror genre is a way of processing our fears and anxieties, and as a result tends to reflect the issues that exist at the time the stories or films are written. During the Reagan era, in the early 1980s, horror films tended to depict attacks on innocence, with grisly deaths befalling wayward teens, their […]
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SuperFly, a modern-day remake of the 1972 blaxploitation classic — about a successful cocaine dealer of color who wants to get out of the business — is a straight crime drama, made by a music video director but not shot like a music video. It’s not kitschy, with no winking cameos by original cast members […]
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Pride Month was ushered in this year by A Kid Like Jake, a tender adaptation of Daniel Pearle’s play about a 4-year-old boy who loves to dress up as princesses. His parents (wonderfully played by Jim Parsons and Claire Danes) struggle to navigate the thorny politics of rearing a gender non-conforming child as they enroll […]
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With a hint of wistfulness to give it some weight, Hearts Beat Loud is a happy, sunshiny movie about saying goodbye, letting go, and collaborating with loved ones to make sick beats. It stars Nick Offerman as Frank Fisher, a widowed record-shop owner and erstwhile musician in Brooklyn whose whip-smart daughter, Sam (Kiersey Clemons), is going […]
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Arguably the first mainstream American film to portray contemporary occultism in depth, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby — released 50 years ago this month — premiered as a palpable fascination with the occult was taking hold. Based upon Ira Levin’s bestselling novel, various real-life occurrences surrounding the film added to its aura of evil, fueling fears that later […]
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Nestled among this spring’s blockbusters, two mid-tier comedies – Overboard and Life of the Party – provided audiences with alternatives in more ways than one. In addition to being options that didn’t involve genocidal giants or mouthy mercenaries, they’re also gender-swapped variations on fondly remembered ’80s films, with Overboard being a literal remake of the […]
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