As a director, Kenneth Branagh is foremost a showman—in fact his subtlest picture was his poignant childhood memoir Belfast—so it comes as a bit of a surprise that his latest, A Haunting in Venice, very loosely based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party…
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Memo to The Nun II filmmakers: you had one job. If nothing else, a horror film must provide thrills. While the new sequel to the 2018 hit The Nun may look great, it is dull, overlong and scare-free. The eighth—yes, eighth—picture in “The Conjuring…
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Emma Seligman, whose 2020 debut Shiva Baby, a zinger of an anxious comedy about an aimless Manhattan collegiate “sugar baby” in an identity crisis during a shiva, turns impressive satirist with her sophomore picture Bottoms—a radically “queer” high school comedy that plays like a mash up…
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Ira Sachs’ Passages, about a Parisian menage-a-not between an egoist filmmaker, played with zeal by the great German actor Franz Rogowski, his long-suffering partner (Ben Whishaw) and a schoolteacher (Adele Exarchopolous) drawn into his orbit, is a lusty provocation about modern love warfare and…
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Demonic possession is an intoxicant in the scary Talk to Me, an updated twist on the supernatural thriller and one that finds a group of youths taking the notion of a Ouija board to creepy new extremes. The first feature by Australian YouTube stars…
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Sitting across from the dynamic twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, as I am this morning at the famed The Peninsula Chicago, is an exhilarating trip. With the arrival of their terrific debut picture, Talk to Me, the wildly energetic, inventive duo have graduated…
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Perhaps the biggest surprise of the movie year—or two of them—is that Greta Gerwig’s much-anticipated Barbie has become a runaway cultural moment in a way a movie hasn’t landed in the zeitgeist in perhaps years, and that—delightfully—it’s actually good (and frequently very good). In a picture…
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Christopher Nolan’s A-bomb opus Oppenheimer is a dense, often accomplished and sometimes portentous character study that both intrigues and alienates in its study of the birth of the Atomic Age and mastermind physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s (Cillian Murphy) WWII-era race to complete the world’s first…
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In a summer marked by stale spectacles—a Flash in the pan, Transformers flying under the radar and even the crack of Indiana Jones’ bullwhip failing to generate excitement—the extravagant escapism of Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One makes for the summer’s best movie and the only…
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The ill-conceived Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny disappoints as a lackluster return for the renowned archaeologist and adventurer. Despite the enduring star power of Harrison Ford, this tired installment fails to generate the same level of excitement that defined its predecessors, devoid…
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