In 2015, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road arrived with the force of a thunderclap, reinvigorating a franchise that helped to define the 80s’ action movie while catapulting Mel Gibson to stardom as a rogue ex-cop turned solitary avenger in a dystopian wasteland. The…
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Watching Pamela Adlon’s razor-sharp comedy Babes recently with a packed theatrical audience signaled an unmistakable return to that collective movie audience mojo—enjoying a joke and enjoying that others are enjoying it too—which these days is hard to come by in a challenging moment of…
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A wiser man than I once said that without heart there can be no art. By this barometer, Jane Schoenbrun’s arthouse curio I Saw the TV Glow is hardly the instant masterpiece it’s been inexplicably ordained. The picture may be a conceptual thesis—but it…
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As movie-movie in-jokes go, David Leitch’s divertingly bombastic The Fall Guy has as much genuine reverence for its subject as gentle cynicism for its industry. That it (ever so) works is a testament to the aggressive charm offensive of star Ryan Gosling, driving a…
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The first terrific American film of 2024, Luca Guadagnino’s intoxicating Challengers is the rare, full-throttle piece of adult commercial entertainment—a smartly written, adroitly acted and technically superb piece of electric moviemaking from its opening scene to its perfect final shot. It also gives a…
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In French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, Leá Seydoux and George MacKay play triple roles in a conceptually audacious roundelay of impossible love and desire across three distinct eras. It’s a film nearly impossible to describe, at once a period costume melodrama, contemporary stalker…
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In the new drama Hard Miles, Matthew Modine gets his best role in years as a transformative youth counselor guiding a cohort of troubled young men on an audacious 762-mile bicycle trek from Watkins, Colorado to the Grand Canyon—a journey designed to promote healing…
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Alex Garland’s button pushing Civil War offers a vision of the United States as hell, a near-future dystopian hallucination of a country torn by militias and warcraft, marked by third-term presidents, secession-driven military factions, guerrilla citizenry and wearily intrepid journalists documenting its descent. Telling…
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Someone once observed that there is nothing in the world worse than going nowhere in life while no one seems to care. In the inspiring new picture Hard Miles (Blue Fox Entertainment, April 19), the true story of Colorado social worker turned bicycling coach…
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As guided tours of hell go, Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s searing New York City paramedics drama Asphalt City is too much yet not enough, an overheated descent into a pitch black abyss lacking connective character tissue to be fully compelling, despite convicted performances by stars Tye…
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