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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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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