If any remaining proof of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy should be required, the more-is-less Terminator: Genisys should put the issue to bed once and for all. An all-out assault on both the senses and storytelling, this overblown mess of a movie appropriates entire chunks of…
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A good-natured sex farce about the insecure male ego and flirting with marital experimentation, The Overnight is a cheerfully raunchy ode to ennui and swinging that is revolutionary in its own small ways. Light as a feather but no less enjoyable—actually quite enjoyable—this broad…
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The latest entry in the haunted family saga of otherworldly entities and vengeful spirits, Insidious: Chapter 3 is notable for one reason, and a good one—veteran character actress Lin Shaye as reticent medium Elise Rainier. If awards were given for performances in genre films—and…
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The most imaginative and directorially accomplished movie of the year, Mad Max: Fury Road is a hell of a vision from director George Miller, 70 and at the peak of his powers, upending the action genre by delivering an antithetical, feminist war cry that…
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Oliver Assays’ Clouds of Sils Maria is an opaque conceptual trip, a thematically dense exercise in self and industry reflections, a nod to both Fassbinder and Bergman and a showcase for its actresses, namely Juliette Binoche as an internationally renown actress undergoing an identity…
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The creepy teen cyber thriller Unfriended is patently ludicrous and low-concept—six teens connected via video chat are stalked and dispatched by an Internet troll that turns out to be the vengeful ghost of their bullied best friend, who killed herself over their online taunting.…
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Smart, stylish and enthralling, the artificial intelligence thriller Ex Machina fires on all cylinders as a first-rate piece of science fiction, superbly written, performed and mounted as the debut feature from screenwriter and first-time director Alex Garland. As science fiction, it employs some hard…
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Where are you in life versus where you thought you would be? Or perhaps where the world says you are supposed to be? Noah Baumbach’s refreshing While We’re Young is a Woody Allen-esque, sidewalks of New York comedy, but one that sparkles with insights…
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Good intentions do not a good movie make, and the well-meaning Desert Dancer, the true story of Iran’s Afshin Ghaffarian, who challenged his country’s ban on dancing by forming a clandestine dance troupe before being beaten down by Iran’s political climate and eventually escaping…
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Everything that worked in 2011’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—a fully-lived in collection of senior characters going through crisis, reinvention, love and death played by a sterling cast of grand thesps investing a perfect blend of humor and pathos—is missing from its formulaic, by…
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