A terrific Vera Farmiga and Christopher Plummer drive the family road movie Boundaries, about a hard-won reconciliation between a father and daughter who, try as they might, have never been able to make their relationship work. Written and directed by Shana Feste, it’s a…
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Across four features, writer-director Shana Feste has displayed a compassion for her characters that defines her a distinctly humanist filmmaker, one who writes people she dearly cares for and then pushes them into difficult places. Whether parents grieving a son’s untimely death, a country and…
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Hereditary, about a troubled family coming apart after a tragedy leads to an intrusion of the supernatural, is among the best, and rarest, kinds of scary movies, both a thoroughly observed examination of personal and human dynamics and diabolical descent into a place so…
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Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, the surprise of the commercial moviegoing year, is a sleeper of a picture that outpaces the season’s big Hollywood effects movies with ideas and craft and moderate scale, a cautionary sci-fi actioner about AI, vengeance and what we are losing in…
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Writer-director Leigh Whannell makes art out of pulp in Upgrade, the year’s most inventive and entertaining movie, a mash up of Verhoeven, Cronenberg, Cameron, Crichton and a touch of Clarke. A freewheeling, near future, sci-fi actioner that manages to incorporate a spectrum of influences…
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Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, about a reverend’s crisis of faith, is the most narratively and thematically ambitious American film this year. A meditation on spiritual ennui and glimpse into the mind of a bleak character peering into the abyss without comfort, Schrader’s film is…
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At 72, Paul Schrader has crafted one of his finest pictures in First Reformed, the story of a bereft reverend, played by Ethan Hawke, who undergoes a dark night of the soul before perhaps—or not—achieving transcendence. One of the few great pictures this year…
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One might imagine that any movie written by Ian McEwan based one of his novels and starring Saoirse Ronan would be a high-toned, psychologically complex and absorbing trip. Yet in the case of On Chesil Beach, one would be wrong. In a tedious misfire,…
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Book Club, director Bill Holderman’s sweet, funny new comedy about four lifelong friends unexpectedly liberated by Fifty Shades of Grey, says it’s never too late to rediscover yourself—and love. But the real story in this glossy, zippy movie starring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice…
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