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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Samba

Samba, the good-hearted story of a Senegalese immigrant in Paris fighting deportation, is a sum of its parts picture. Written and directed by the French duo Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano from the novel Samba pour la France by Delphine Coulin, it’s a movie…

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