The chief reason to see Another Round is a terrific performance from Mads Mikkelsen, teaming up once again with The Hunt director Thomas Vinterberg for a Danish drama with a provocative premise—what if the answer to a mid-life crisis is to forego antidepressants and…
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Netflix and Ryan Murphy’s exuberant new movie adaptation of the 2016 Broadway hit The Prom, about a troupe of down-on-their-luck Broadway babies turned social justice warriors swooping into rural Indiana to save a high school prom from cancellation, is a broad, tongue-firmly-in-cheek confection both…
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Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s movie version of 2016’s heralded cultural anthropology epic Hilbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family In Crisis, is a sum-of-its-parts picture and reductive adaptation which, often in spite of itself, has strong enough performances to ultimately be compelling. And that’s…
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Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are sensational in the fine Western thriller Let Him Go, in which they play a retired, small-town Montana cop and headstrong wife who inadvertently run afoul of a nefarious crime family, led by a hardboiled Lesley Manville. As directed…
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Bleak, unrelenting and essential, The Painted Bird, a house of horrors disguised as a movie, is a picture of such blunt raw force that, the story goes, it drove viewers for the exits at film festivals late last year (though Václav Marhoul, the film’s…
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The “time-loop” comedy Palm Springs, lauded since its Sundance debut earlier this year, is a broad, anything goes gimmick with two likable actors in a movie that prizes contrived cleverness over all else, including honest laughs and its likable leads, who deserve a better…
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What has happened to American film directors today? Where are the sociopolitical critiques? The inquiries into government? Observations on the culture wars tearing at our seams? The balls to make a movie actually about the times in which we live? Make way for Spike…
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I had little knowledge of Pete Davidson going into the new Judd Apatow picture The King of Staten Island. I’d never seen his comic stints on SNL and was more familiar with his paparazzi-fueled, pop culture romantic dalliances than anything related to either his…
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In a few short years, Elizabeth Moss has cornered the market on emotionally fraught, through-the-ringer screen characters, from The Handmaid’s Tale’s subjugated Hester to Her Smell’s strung-out rocker and The Invisible Man’s tormented object of obsession. In her latest portrait of turmoil, Moss is…
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