When an unassuming little 2012 fantasy about hunky male strippers is parlayed into a multi-installment franchise across more than a decade, we are at a tipping point with American movie consumerism. While such box office pursuit may be de rigueur for the junk food…
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In Victor Nunez’ superb 1992 indie drama Ruby in Paradise, a young Ashley Judd fled the Tennessee sticks for a life on her own in Panama City Beach, Florida, eking out a living in souvenir trinket shop. During one key scene she encountered a…
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M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, about a life-or-death dilemma and impending apocalypse, is a thought-provoking exercise in tension open to a number of interpretations. Is it merely about a scary home invasion or the genuine threat of human extinction? Blind faith versus…
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An intermittently intriguing exercise in designer depravity, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, about a failed novelist on a seaside vacation turned tour of hell, is gripping fun until it isn’t. It has its merits—chiefly very good performances by Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth—but wears out…
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The picture is an unmistakable critique of slavish devotion to small town articles of faith and the dangers of violating such credos, and a rebuke to small minded fears of the outside world.…
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The notion of women punching their way through the predetermined confines of male orders and role restrictions has never, at any point in time, not seemed of its current moment. It’s also an urgent theme in many a novel or film as women challenge…
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The January movie landscape (often referred to as “the dumping ground”) is typically not synonymous with intelligence and discernment, particularly amongst the usual crop of horror pictures that kick off each new year. Yet those qualities are exactly the drivers of the cautionary new…
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I recently endured a milestone birthday which felt like a sort of dividing line—one of those everything before/after demarcations forcing, for perhaps the first time in my adult life, a realization of being “on the other side” of the proverbial hill. How to best…
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More is much more in Babylon, Damien Chazelle’s mammoth period ode to a Hollywood in transition circa 1927 and plunge into gleeful debauchery, mad invention and wild excess. In a movie bound to divide audiences, adventurous cineastes will love Chazelle’s go-for-broke, enfant terrible provocation…
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A now-familiar skeptics’ refrain tends to follow James Cameron during the run ups to his often game-changing pictures—they are too expensive and rife with cost overruns that will bankrupt their studios; their onset dynamics are ruled by “king of the world” megalomania; that he…
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