After the glowing reception for her Oscar-nominated 2023 debut Past Lives, Celine Song could have easily followed up with a crowd-pleasing hit that “checks all the boxes”—a phrase her new film, Materialists, uses not-so-ironically to describe the modern partner checklist. Funny? Check. Smart? Check.…
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Ballerina, in which Ana de Armas spends two hours enthusiastically handing out and receiving beatdowns, is hitting theaters with a jumbo official title: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Given its reportedly chaotic production of delays, reshoots and budget overruns, you can hardly…
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Two summers ago Danny and Michael Philippou made a striking horror debut with Talk to Me, their scary possession thriller about teens summoning spirits via the creepy severed hand of a dead psychic. Fun and fresh, audiences responded to the tune of $100 million global…
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Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie return for what feels like a culminating chapter in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the $400 million follow-up to 2023’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1. But while the 2023 installment ranked as one of the series’ most fast-paced and…
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Why do adult men often struggle to make friends with other men? Such fraught camaraderie dynamics inform writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s black comedy Friendship, in which an ill-fated bromance makes for an observant movie which, like the great human comedies, mines hilarity from humiliation and…
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It’s been 25 years since Final Destination first arrived on screens, its crafty (and best) 2000 original ushering in a popular franchise predicated on elaborately contrived mayhem and driven by grim musings on mortality and fate. Fourteen years have passed since the last installment, which makes…
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On Swift Horses, a period melodrama about hidden love and sexual identity in 1950s America, is so tasteful it makes you wish it would cut loose with the abandon its characters experience in their frequently heated moments of self-discovery. Featuring an attractive cast led…
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In his beautifully mounted spellbinder Sinners, writer-director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed) mixes tones, styles and genres to supremely entertaining heights in a boldly confident piece of studio movie showmanship. Across a sumptuous, 137-minute picture about a pair of ne’er-do-well twin brothers returning from the big…
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Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare is a relentless, war is hell exercise delivering exactly what its title promises: an immersive descent into the chaos of combat. Collaborators on last year’s provocation Civil War (Garland helmed with Mendoza as military advisor), the pair has…
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From its well-cut trailer, The Alto Knights appeared to have all of the requisites of a good studio entertainment—Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson helming, star Robert DeNiro back in beloved mafioso mode and screenwriter Nicolas Pileggi (Goodfellas, Casino, The Irishman) penning another true tale of wise-guy intrigue. Yet watching The…
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