A few months ago, Ti West’s MaXXXine dropped a ripping good trailer promising the lurid thrills of adult film actress Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), stalked by a Hollywood slasher in a perfectly recreated 1985 Tinseltown milieu. But the film’s arrival proves a disappointment, West…
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Familiarity proves a slight problem for A Quiet Place: Day One, an origin story preceding the first two hit films and depicting the arrival of the deadly alien race bent on decimating humanity. The problem this time is mainly one of sameness—here we have…
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You have to hand it to Yorgos Lanthimos. After taking the Oscar season by storm with his ribald liberation saga Poor Things, the celebrated writer-director has returned to his anarchic origins with the misanthropic Kinds of Kindness, a marathon of twisted deadpan and gleeful…
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A taxi driver and his passenger unexpectedly bond in writer-director Christy Hall’s Daddio, starring Sean Penn and Dakota Johnson on an extended trip from JFK to Midtown, one yielding plenty of talk and transformation. It’s a two-character “small” picture with a few bigger ideas…
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Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders, a thundering paen to the birth of American motorcycle culture, is high-gear style and attitude eclipsing a story stuck in neutral. Inspired by Danny Lyon’s 1968 photography book of the same title—which chronicled the circa 60s Chicago exploits of biker…
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The construct of identity—things we believe ourselves to be, limiting notions of what we could become and the potential for self-evolution—power Richard Linklater’s Hit Man, a feather-light comedy about a mild-mannered college professor who moonlights as a phony hit man, only to fall hard…
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Would you be interested in seeing a film with little plot, depth, character or structure? How about a horror film lacking suspense but prizing extreme gore over all else? If the answer to those questions is “I’ll pass,” then steer clear of In a…
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In 2015, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road arrived with the force of a thunderclap, reinvigorating a franchise that helped to define the 80s’ action movie while catapulting Mel Gibson to stardom as a rogue ex-cop turned solitary avenger in a dystopian wasteland. The…
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Watching Pamela Adlon’s razor-sharp comedy Babes recently with a packed theatrical audience signaled an unmistakable return to that collective movie audience mojo—enjoying a joke and enjoying that others are enjoying it too—which these days is hard to come by in a challenging moment of…
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A wiser man than I once said that without heart there can be no art. By this barometer, Jane Schoenbrun’s arthouse curio I Saw the TV Glow is hardly the instant masterpiece it’s been inexplicably ordained. The picture may be a conceptual thesis—but it…
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