Unbroken

Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s long-awaited adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, the extraordinary story of World War II vet and former Olympian Louis Zamperini’s experiences surviving Japanese POW camps, is a crushing movie disappointment. What should…

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Into the Woods

Director Rob Marshall and Disney had high expectations and a bit of skepticism riding on their adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s beloved 1986 musical Into the Woods, and what initially seemed an unwieldy combination—a fractured trio of fairy tales where love doesn’t…

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Wild

What do you do when you’re mired in a painful past and your identity is so shaped by regret and emptiness that you no longer recognize yourself?  If you’re Cheryl Strayed, you draw a line in the sand—one that reaches 1100 miles along the…

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Foxcatcher

We know how he did it—on January 26, 1996, billionaire eccentric John Eleuthere du Pont shot and killed, in cold blood, Olympic wrestler and gold medalist Dave Schultz. But why did he? Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s arresting new picture on the subject, has some very…

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The Theory of Everything

The Theory of Everything is both a fascinating biopic of renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and a complex love story told from the perspective of Hawking’s long-suffering wife, Jane, whose memoirs informed this portrait of a marriage that nearly made it through everything, and two…

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Interstellar

An imperfect masterwork still qualifies as one, and Christopher Nolan’s transcendent magnum opus Interstellar is perhaps the most thematically and technically ambitious mainstream movie in memory, one so demanding for its 169-minute running time that at times it feels like a final exam, but…

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Birdman

Birdman, Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu’s audacious backstage redemption tale, is at once an incisive portrait of the artistic ego and a rage against the dying of the (spot)light, a personal movie about art as savior, second chances, aging, irrelevance and an indictment of a fickle industry…

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Fury

The aptly titled new war picture Fury, starring Brad Pitt as an American sergeant leading a band of GIs through Germany at the close of the World War II, is a machine of a movie that storms both the battlefields and the emotions.  Fashioned…

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The Disapperance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him

Comprised of two distinct features and running 195 minutes, The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her/Him is both too much and not enough.  Arriving a mere few weeks after the film’s initial release, a 122-minute version titled The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them, the new…

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This Is Where I Leave You

Too clever by half and too broad to be genuinely funny, the contrived family dramedy This Is Where I Leave You favors situational contrivances over honest characters.  It’s the sign of a distinctly modern movie such as this that after winding us up with…

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