Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, finds the persecuted Iranian sociopolitical essayist back in strong form after No Bears landed him in back jail in 2022. Forbidden to make films in Iran,…
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After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino’s portentous drama about a Yale professor caught up in a campus scandal, is one of the year’s big disappointments—an overwritten discourse that wastes a terrific cast by mistaking culture-war talking points for character, and topicality for drama. Nora Garrett’s…
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I recently caught up with writer-director Derek Cianfrance in Chicago on a bright fall afternoon on the eve of the premiere of his surprisingly tender new film, Roofman — a story about an escaped convict whose humanity becomes both his undoing and his redemption.…
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By now we well know the story of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which has been around in various incarnations for the better part of a half century since Manuel Puig first published his award-winning 1976 novel. But what a story it is, and…
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The best that can be said about Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine is that Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt give it everything they’ve got. If only they were able to elevate the material in Safdie’s solo directorial debut, an insular and small-scaled film that…
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