Julia Roberts pulls out all the stops in a career high performance—one that reminds us how much empathy we can have for an actor we hold dear—in Ben is Back, a searing look at the bond between a mother and son over 24-hours of…
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Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, one of the year’s best-acted movies, is an “issue” movie done so well it far surpasses another well-meaning, troubled teen picture this season. Both movies are about real-life teens in crisis—one forced into gay conversion “therapy,” the other in the…
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“No one in their right mind would do what you do,” journalist Marie Colvin is told late in A Private War, an absorbing character study of a woman who lived, and not always fearlessly, in harm’s way on the front lines of the bloodiest…
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The mystique of Lisbeth Salander—that iconic, proto-feminist hacker turned crusader against the evil that men do—has been mostly sidelined in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a disappointingly routine action picture that miscalculates by diminishing Salander’s knife-edged persona, her propensity for dispensing grim justice…
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Ambition gets the best of an off-day Luca Guadagnino in his revisionist Suspiria, a leaden reimagining of Dario Argento’s phantasmagoric 1977 shocker about a witches’ coven at a prestigious German dance academy and the American student who discovers its secret. The story goes that…
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A tale as old as time—or at least Hollywood—receives an electrifying new update in Bradley Cooper’s rousing A Star is Born, as vividly rendered, romantic and affecting a Hollywood picture as we’ve seen in ages. It may also be the best version of a…
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Handsome, historical, breezily progressive and featuring a radiant Keira Knightley, Colette is a meditation of the spirit of an artist—here a turn of the 20th century proto-feminist and erotic fiction novelist—out of her time. In a period picture with a notable contemporary relevance, Knightley…
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