In two films together, writer-actress Brit Marling and writer-director Zal Batmanglij have explored issues of identity, and both spiritual and cultural alienation. Distinct and intelligent, both 2011’s Sound of My Voice, about a mysterious Los Angeles cult leader (the transfixing Marling) and their new…
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The East, a thought-provoking thriller about a secret agent that infiltrates an “eco-terrorist” faction targeting billion-dollar corporations culpable in some very dirty deeds, is a hell of a provocative picture, a spy movie that forces us to reexamine our notions of terrorism. Co-written by…
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Dave Franco looks and sounds a bit like a certain older brother we all know and love. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, the charming younger Franco—currently carving out an impressive movie career in big screen comedies like 21 Jump Street,…
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Now You See Me is a movie with very little story or character, but a hell of a lot of plot and pizzazz. And that’s mostly okay in this piffle of a caper film, the kind of high-concept contemporary movie-movie that operates in a…
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It’s a very rare movie that presents a character you want, above all costs, to be happy. And What Maisie Knew, the moving new adaptation of Henry James’ 1897 novel of a young girl in peril, is such a film. In the center of a…
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Note: This review contains plot spoilers. A mostly disappointing sequel to the gleaming 2009 series reboot, Star Trek Into Darkness is a movie that gives us a recycled villain, by-the-numbers directing and nothing new from the J.J. Abrams canon. It’s serviceable and enlivened by…
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Say what you will about Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited (and much-delayed) vision of The Great Gatsby—a lavish, decadence-drunk period fantasia equal parts artifice and genuine emotion—but all that glitters (literally off the screen here in 3D) is all that matters in this surprisingly faithful adaptation of…
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On May 26, 1977—a long time ago in a rural Michigan town pretty far away—I vividly recall seeing something called Star Wars on the first Saturday matinee of its opening weekend. As my mother and I arrived on that early summer afternoon, we were…
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Continuing his departure from conventional storytelling, Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder is a frustratingly abstract experience that’s either an accomplished piece of narrative minimalism or empty and underwritten. As much as I admire maverick Malick, one of the few American visionary directors left and…
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