Michel Franco’s Dreams is a sobering statement on power and exploitation, masquerading as a love affair between an affluent American and a Mexican ballet prodigy locked in a game of escalating stakes. Jessica Chastain, in a bold performance, is a calculating San Franciscan arts patron whose…
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This movie season has given us three sensational political thrillers including Jafar Panahi’s battle cry against Iran’s theocratic regime in the Palme d’Or winning It Was Just an Accident andKleber Mendonca Filho’s The Secret Agent rebuke of Brazil’s military dictatorship and its power to assassinate the lives and…
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The degree to which Marty Supreme—Josh Safdie’s live-wire tale of American gumption and hustle, starring Timothée Chalamet in a career performance—works for you is likely to depend on how you feel about Chalamet himself. If you plug into the star’s rich commitment to craft, you’ll…
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There will be little middle ground on James Cameron’s thrilling Avatar: Fire and Ash; you’ll either find it richly transporting or, well, expected. Perhaps both. Sure, it’s what you think it is—a battle royale between tall blue beings and colonizing invaders loaded with dazzling…
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Hamnet arrives in theaters with quite a reputation preceding it—that of a movie with such elemental power that it shook fall film festival audiences to their cores, awash in tears. But does the power to make an audience cry—that primal, communal catharsis that movies…
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The exquisite Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s hypnotic, dreamlike portrait of a common American life at the turn of the 20th century, is a lush evocation of a world and man in transition, anchored by a remarkable Joel Edgerton as a Pacific Northwest logger and…
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Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, finds the persecuted Iranian sociopolitical essayist back in strong form after No Bears landed him in back jail in 2022. Forbidden to make films in Iran,…
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After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino’s portentous drama about a Yale professor caught up in a campus scandal, is one of the year’s big disappointments—an overwritten discourse that wastes a terrific cast by mistaking culture-war talking points for character, and topicality for drama. Nora Garrett’s…
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By now we well know the story of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which has been around in various incarnations for the better part of a half century since Manuel Puig first published his award-winning 1976 novel. But what a story it is, and…
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The best that can be said about Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine is that Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt give it everything they’ve got. If only they were able to elevate the material in Safdie’s solo directorial debut, an insular and small-scaled film that…
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