The ad campaign is selling Battle of the Sexes as a high comedy, but it’s also a complex behind-the-scenes relationship drama as much about tennis legend Billie Jean King’s hidden identity politics as the overt social ones driving the plot. Directed by Valerie Faris…
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It isn’t Shakespeare, but rather a wicked subversion of Jane Austen on order in the terrific new Lady Macbeth, a tightly coiled portrait of a desperate Victorian housewife who goes to, well, drastic measures for liberation. The picture has the tasteful elegance of any…
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Luc Besson’s epic folly Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a work of unbridled “creativity” that left me agog—and not happily—at its high-concept silliness performed with all the energy of rigor mortis by two sullen, miscast stars without clue what kind…
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The Marvel superhero franchise, labored with one picture after another churned out to capitalize on the individual and collective Avengers is as commoditized as American movies get. They don’t even have to be good. Except now there’s one that is, and it happens to…
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Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled, for which she won the directing prize at Cannes this year, is a sum of its parts picture with enough going for it to recommend, but not quite enough to transcend its inherently pulpy story. But it sure is fun…
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Beatriz at Dinner may be a wisp of a movie—the credits roll at about the 70-minute mark—but it’s one that couldn’t feel more timely and tapped into the current zeitgeist of what it’s like to be a have or have not in contemporary America.…
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