SPECTRE

SPECTRE, the 24th official James Bond picture, has the same director, writers and star as 2012’s series high watermark Skyfall, but that’s where similarities end.  Watching this often entertaining movie, it’s best to put that superlative outing out of one’s mind and enjoy lesser…

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Suffragette

Director Sarah Gavron has taken what might have been a tony period piece about women standing up to oppression in 1912 London and fashioned an urgent, immediate and gripping war movie about loss and sacrifice.  It’s a battle, Suffragette says, to effect social and…

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Our Brand is Crisis

Sandra Bullock is the world’s savviest political consultant in David Gordon Green’s underwhelming satire Our Brand is Crisis, a picture so telegraphed and unenlightening that its biggest crime, ultimately, is merely playing it safe, edgy as it thinks it is.  There is nothing new…

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Room

Parent-child intimacy has rarely been so vividly etched in the movies as in the moving Room, in which we witness a mother and young son locked away in a single-room hellhole before escaping to a completely new set of challenges in the outside world.…

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99 Homes

More than any other filmmaker of the moment, Ramin Bahrani charts stories of disenfranchised men who face moral quagmires afoul of the American dream.   In 2013’s superb At Any Price, Dennis Quaid was a Midwestern farmer who would stop at nothing to preserve the…

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Straight Outta Compton

The exhilaration of Straight Outta Compton, one of the year’s best movies, is that of a good story, well-told with vivid performances and a stirring, contemporary sociopolitical context. Charting the rise, fall and rise of seminal hip hop forerunners N.W.A., director F. Gary Gray…

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