The first terrific movie of 2016, the Coen Brothers’ lavishly inspired Hollywood satire Hail, Caesar! is one of their very best comedies, a gleaming love letter to the old Hollywood studio system that both evangelizes the transformative magic of the movies while affectionately critiquing…
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You really have to hand it to director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose films never cozy up to their audiences, instead demanding a partnership that can be agonizing in the moment but always haunting, enlightening even, upon reflection. With a handful of rigorously commanding movies under his belt, from…
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Todd Haynes’ Carol, as gorgeously rendered an evocation of star-crossed love as the movies has maybe known, is a meticulously mounted, finely felt and beautifully acted examination of the costs of self-actualization in an unforgiving world. With a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy from Patricia Highsmith’s…
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The most important thing to know about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it returns a sense of fun to a floundering franchise—one that also happens to be the best loved movie property in history. With two new characters and a handful of…
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Eddie Redmayne gives the year’s best male performance in The Danish Girl, a fascinating portrait of real-life transgender pioneer Lile Elbe, the Danish painter who came to realize that her gender identity and physical body were incongruous and who, with neither the acceptance of…
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As an audacious warning alarm about Black-on-Black violence in Chicago and using every tool in his arsenal, Spike Lee’s high-wire act Chi-Raq is many things—social parable wrapped in sex satire piqued with music, spoken verse, direct address, set pieces, lavish color, high comedy and…
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