Cheap thrills dressed up as very high art, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon is the year’s most outrageously entertaining movie, a stylish exercise in depravity from which you cannot pull yourself away for a spellbinding two hours. It’s pure cinema about a soiled…
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You’ll want to book a Sandals Resort package, minus the snorkeling, after seeing The Shallows, featuring comely Blake Lively in a bikini menaced by a Great White shark for 80 or so well-directed minutes. Expert technique masks a scant survival story in Spanish director…
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There’s really only one reason that a horror film doesn’t work, and it isn’t lack of originality or a reliance on genre tropes. If the fear factor is missing, then forget it. James Wan, the director of Saw and Insidious, knows damned well how…
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A catastrophically confused movie, Me Before You peddles a questionable message about living with disabilities and then tricks us into believing in redemption through a cornball love story before leading us to a tragic foregone conclusion. It works hard to gain empathy and make…
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Simultaneously about everything and nothing, Luca Guadagnino’s luscious A Bigger Splash is a glossy paen to the lifestyles of the rich and famous, here the seaside affairs of an international rock star (Tilda Swinton) entangled in a hothouse of temptation. What it lacks in…
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How can there be so little to say about a movie that tries—so hard—to do so much? Perhaps because Captain America: Civil War, the latest Marvel cash cow, is an overstuffed and altogether unnecessary movie that throws so much at us that the only…
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There is simply no reason to care about anything in Green Room, an exercise in nihilism that begins with grit before quickly devolving into unrestrained violence minus the empathy or substance to give it consequence. Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier as a sophomore…
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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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