In the inventive and frequently surprising Dream Scenario, filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli crafts a potent critique of flash-in-the-pan viral fame and our societal fickleness in making instant celebrities before breaking them as casualties of fifteen-minute brand recognition. The ever welcome, inspired Nicolas Cage stars as…
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In the arresting All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, a fictional memoir rendered in non-linear structure and rooted in emotion, confident first-time feature filmmaker Raven Jackson conveys the poetic lyricism of Terrence Malick by way of the minutely observant Kelly Reichardt. Thirty-three-year-old Tennessee native…
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Sitting across from the dynamic twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, as I am this morning at the famed The Peninsula Chicago, is an exhilarating trip. With the arrival of their terrific debut picture, Talk to Me, the wildly energetic, inventive duo have graduated…
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As theatrical box office numbers continue their upswing heading into a packed summer movie season, Emagine Entertainment, the national, Michigan-based theatrical exhibition chain specializing in a complete moviegoing experience from top notch projection and sound to high-end amenities like heated recliners, brick-oven pizza and…
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Chicago-born comedian and actor Sebastian Maniscalco is having a movie moment this weekend as his seriocomic and partially autobiographical new comedy About My Father, which he co-wrote and in which he stars, opens on screens around the country. In the film Maniscalco, whose stand-up…
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I caught up with Holderman and Simms—a delightful pair of simpatico collaborators tasked with crafting an audience-pleasing commercial entertainment befitting a cast of movie royalty—for a chat about their ambitious new picture.…
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In their new picture Hilma, Lena Olin and Tora Hallström play cross-generational versions of pioneering Swedish abstract artist and mystic Hilma af Klint, a quintessential woman out of time whose groundbreaking works were dismissed by the early 20th century patriarchal artistic establishment. A modern,…
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Filmmaker Kelly Reichardt—whose three-decade career as an independent filmmaker specializing in spare, minimalist excursions—is an artist freed from American commercial sensibilities; a nonconformist favoring nuance over plot and ambiguity over resolution. In pictures like Wendy and Lucy, about a young homeless woman searching for…
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On his fourth directorial outing, actor-writer-filmmaker Zach Braff has crafted a remarkable portrait of friendship and healing between a pair of very unlikely characters, played by an equally unlikely—and very winning—Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman. In A Good Person, Pugh is a New Jersey…
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In the new romantic comedy Somebody I Used to Know (Prime Video, February 10), Alison Brie stars as a successful Hollywood journalist facing a professional crisis who returns to her hometown of Leavenworth, Washington, to plan her next move. What she doesn’t expect, after…
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