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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In Twinless, two young men meet in a support group for surviving halves of twin siblings and quickly develop a connection. Pretty good topic for a movie, right? Yet that setup is not quite what writer-director James Sweeney (Straight Up) has on his mind…
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In Bing Liu’s Preparation for the Next Life, a young woman and man cross paths by chance in New York City and soon plunge into a love that will be tested, though not always in the ways we might expect. That couple—an undocumented Uyghur…
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Jay Duplass’ The Baltimorons is the kind of movie that starts amiable and amusing only to sneak up on you with surprising feeling. It’s been a remarkably strong year for small, handmade indies (Friendship, A Little Prayer, Splitsville, Twinless, Preparation for the Next Life),…
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It’s been awhile since Darren Aronofsky delivered a film as sharp as Caught Stealing, his most commercial-friendly outing yet and an unexpected late-summer surprise. Working from Charlie Huston’s screenplay of his own novel, Aronofsky shapes a gritty and unpredictable New York crime tale that…
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A comedy has one job—to make you laugh—and if it fires off a gag a minute and you only chuckle a handful of times, it isn’t working. By that barometer, the new Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson in the deadpan Police Squad! mode…
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If you grew up as a teen boy in the 1980s and had even a cursory interest in movies, you surely fell in love with the horror movie renaissance that shaped the first half of that decade (and is still imitated, reconfigured and meta-ed…
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Nostalgia can be a wonderfully horrible thing, especially when what’s being romanticized rarely lines up with reality. Such is the case with the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, an attempt to resurrect a ’90s slasher franchise that was competent enough, sure—but…
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Across four films, 38-year-old writer-director Ari Aster has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. Breaking out with 2018’s trauma thriller Hereditary and 2019’s pagan horror Midsommar, Aster took a turn with the surreal 2023 panic attack Beau Is Afraid. Tonally disparate but thematically linked,…
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Writer-director Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival screenwriting prize, is a deceptively modest indie, one made in spare style but delivering a quietly powerful punch in confronting the long-term fallout of sexual assault. Trauma splits life into a before…
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