Twin Peaks: The Return managed to both exceed and confound its viewers’ expectations. This feat is doubly impressive considering how little was known about the plot or structure of the show before it aired beyond Showtime CEO David Nevins’ description of it as “an emotional story about Cooper’s odyssey back to Twin Peaks.” That, along […]
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Two of the best movies from this summer, Wonder Woman and Atomic Blonde, have been called by some the “girl version” of earlier movies about characters like Superman or James Bond. Some critics and audiences have argued that if it weren’t for the protagonists’ gender, these movies wouldn’t be remarkable at all. But I would […]
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A handful of innocent sheep are stalked by a coyote at the beginning of Wind River, an intense, somber mystery-thriller set on the Wyoming Indian reservation of that name. But the coyote is soon dispatched by a greater predator, or at least a better-armed one: Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a hunter for the fish and […]
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This month marks the 30th anniversary of John Sayles’s Matewan, an American classic that fell through the cracks upon release and remains criminally under-seen to this day. The film details the events leading up to 1920 Battle of Matewan (alternatively known as the Matewan Massacre) in West Virginia, which pitted striking coal miners against invading […]
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There’s a lot to like about Matt Spicer’s Sundance darling Ingrid Goes West (now in theaters), a darkly comic tale about an emotionally unstable Instagram obsessive (Aubrey Plaza) who moves to California to insinuate herself into the private life of social media “influencer” Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) and the rest of her avocado-toast-eating, sunhat-wearing inner circle. […]
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Crooked Marquee stands proudly as one of the top 100,000 U.S.-based movie websites on the Internet. As you can imagine, with credentials like those, we get thousands of story pitches from freelance writers. Many of their ideas are insightful and original, but some just aren’t what we’re looking for. Would you like some examples of […]
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“No pointy hats, but plenty of pointy heads.” That’s how the jaded FBI man played by Gene Hackman sums up the Jessup County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning. Sure enough, the Klansmen in the 1988 film eschew the organization’s traditional robes, although some make simple pillowcase hoods when they […]
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Daniel Craig is somehow a leading man. He’s not particularly suave, but he certainly looks good in suits. He’s not particularly romantic, but he’s certainly magnetic. Hollywood has tried him out in a few different ways, but none more successful than when realizing Craig is best as a grimier, imperfect, slightly-off weirdo than a clean-cut […]
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Steven Soderbergh tried to retire a few years ago, but it didn’t take. Perhaps he can relate to Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), the lovable West Virginian ne’er-do-well at the center of Logan Lucky who tries to make an honest living but keeps coming back to the bullet-pointed plan for robbing a bank that’s posted on his […]
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The three most popular professions in cinema, based on the frequency with which they appear in movies, are writers, hitmen, and gaffers. (It’s true, so you don’t need to bother looking it up.) Hitman films in particular are a staple both in Hollywood and abroad, and this week sees yet another one in The Hitman’s […]
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In 1957, European immigrant Frederick Kohner published the novel Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas, about a girl who aspires to be a surfer. Kohner got the idea after watching his daughter, a budding feminist, declare her desire to engage in a “boys-only sport.” Two years later, Hollywood adapted the novel into a film […]
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When it was announced that Quentin Tarantino’s next film would involve the Manson Family murders, the news was met with excitement, outrage, trepidation, and — most curiously — surprise. First of all, you would think that after a quarter-century of following his singular career, people would stop trying to anticipate a filmmaker as idiosyncratic […]
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