This time last year, Hereditary was already being heralded as the best horror film of 2018 following screenings at Sundance and SXSW. And just one year prior, Get Out was praised as one of the best horror films of all time following its premiere at Sundance. Both festivals often yield some of the greatest horror, […]
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Our ongoing and long-overdue reckoning with sexual abuse and harassment has inspired a new wave of cinema; not only are we seeing more empowering and diverse representations of women and minority groups, but we’re seeing stories that reckon with the root cause of so much of this abuse: toxic masculinity. For centuries men have internalized […]
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The disease in Five Feet Apart, the latest romantic drama about two teens in love where at least one of them has an incurable disease, is cystic fibrosis, and they both have it. They meet in the hospital. Stella (Haley Lu Richardson), our chipper, somewhat obsessive-compulsive, video-blogging protagonist, is in for a “tune-up,” as she […]
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The first image in Ron Howard’s 1994 film The Paper is of gears turning inside an alarm clock. It’s a disorienting start to a movie that’s supposed to be about newspapers. It’s also a signal that this movie (released 25 years ago this week) is as obsessed with time as its characters are with getting […]
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Captive State is geeky, serious sci-fi told with a straight face and no comic relief. This is essential because, like most geeky sci-fi, it’s a hair’s breadth from cheesiness: A few missteps and the whole thing becomes a campy laughingstock. But director Rupert Wyatt, who made the similarly perilous Rise of the Planet of the […]
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The setting of Wonder Park, a goopy pile of trash made by a third-tier animation studio, is an amusement park called … Wonderland. Why isn’t the movie called Wonderland? Probably because there are so many other “Wonderland” movies, most of them Alice-related. So why isn’t the park called Wonder Park? Your guess is as good […]
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Over the past few years coming-of-age films have thankfully moved away from typical male-centric stories about teen boys getting drunk and trying to hook up with girls. The genre has come a long way from American Pie and Porky’s, the casual misogyny of the former and the blatant sexism of the latter. Following in the […]
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1999 is considered one of the strongest years of cinema in living memory. There will no doubt be countless articles in 2019 marking the 20th anniversaries of that year’s greatest hits and examining their impact and legacy. But this column isn’t about those movies. This column is about the overlooked gems from 1999 — the […]
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It was one of Walt Disney’s great disappointments that Fantasia (1940) under-performed during its original release, and when it did find an audience, in the 1960s, it probably wasn’t the one Walt would have imagined: people on drugs. Critic Danny Peary documented this strange phenomenon in his landmark 1980 book Cult Movies: “Fantasia has become […]
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The plucky, rough-around-the-edges Canadian thriller Level 16 is a Black Mirror-lite story about teenage girls being trained in a creepy, militaristic sort of finishing school called the Vestalis Academy and located in a secret fortified bunker. The girls, about a dozen of them, spend every waking hour learning how to be “clean girls” — obedient, passive, […]
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OK, Marvelinos! You’ve seen Captain Marvel and reveled in its 1990s awesomeness! (Remember how everyone back then had cats?) But you’re still wondering about a few things — and that’s where we come in! Buckle up and keep reading as we answer your burning questions about the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. How […]
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Many of the people seeing Captain Marvel (myself included) won’t know anything about the character going in except that she’s from Marvel Comics and that you’d think she’d be a bigger deal given that she’s named after the company. After seeing the movie, a middling, good-enough episode in the Marvel Cinematic Universe series, I still […]
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