Now You See Me is a movie with very little story or character, but a hell of a lot of plot and pizzazz. And that’s mostly okay in this piffle of a caper film, the kind of high-concept contemporary movie-movie that operates in a…
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It’s a very rare movie that presents a character you want, above all costs, to be happy. And What Maisie Knew, the moving new adaptation of Henry James’ 1897 novel of a young girl in peril, is such a film. In the center of a…
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Note: This review contains plot spoilers. A mostly disappointing sequel to the gleaming 2009 series reboot, Star Trek Into Darkness is a movie that gives us a recycled villain, by-the-numbers directing and nothing new from the J.J. Abrams canon. It’s serviceable and enlivened by…
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Say what you will about Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited (and much-delayed) vision of The Great Gatsby—a lavish, decadence-drunk period fantasia equal parts artifice and genuine emotion—but all that glitters (literally off the screen here in 3D) is all that matters in this surprisingly faithful adaptation of…
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On May 26, 1977—a long time ago in a rural Michigan town pretty far away—I vividly recall seeing something called Star Wars on the first Saturday matinee of its opening weekend. As my mother and I arrived on that early summer afternoon, we were…
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Continuing his departure from conventional storytelling, Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder is a frustratingly abstract experience that’s either an accomplished piece of narrative minimalism or empty and underwritten. As much as I admire maverick Malick, one of the few American visionary directors left and…
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Disconnect is an unexpected and valuable achievement, a movie plugged into the zeitgeist of how we live and where we are right now, at this particular cultural moment. I can’t remember a recent picture about American life this insightful and gripping, or one that…
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The Place Beyond the Pines, filmmaker Derek Cianfrance’s follow-up to 2010’s Blue Valentine, is about the sins of fathers being visited on sons, fate and a particular kind of grittiness in the working class milieu of Schenectady, New York, depicted here as a dead…
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