Jamie Dack's Sundance winner is a distressing examination of trust, dependency, coercion and, ultimately, exploitation. It is upsetting—and unmissable.…
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A tacitly profound coming-of-age picture featuring one of the best youth performances ever committed to film, the tiny Irish drama The Quiet Girl, the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, is an indisputable masterwork, simple on its face yet possessing an…
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Albert Serra’s haunting post-colonial epic Pacifiction begins and ends with a skiff of French marines arriving, then departing a Tahitian island. Their intentions in this place, eventually revealed across a languorously paced picture with a meticulous insinuation of dread, may or may not be…
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When an unassuming little 2012 fantasy about hunky male strippers is parlayed into a multi-installment franchise across more than a decade, we are at a tipping point with American movie consumerism. While such box office pursuit may be de rigueur for the junk food…
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In Victor Nunez’ superb 1992 indie drama Ruby in Paradise, a young Ashley Judd fled the Tennessee sticks for a life on her own in Panama City Beach, Florida, eking out a living in souvenir trinket shop. During one key scene she encountered a…
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In the new romantic comedy Somebody I Used to Know (Prime Video, February 10), Alison Brie stars as a successful Hollywood journalist facing a professional crisis who returns to her hometown of Leavenworth, Washington, to plan her next move. What she doesn’t expect, after…
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M. Night Shyamalan’s Knock at the Cabin, about a life-or-death dilemma and impending apocalypse, is a thought-provoking exercise in tension open to a number of interpretations. Is it merely about a scary home invasion or the genuine threat of human extinction? Blind faith versus…
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Exquisitely observed and deeply felt, Lukas Dhont’s Cannes Grand Prix winner Close is an adolescent coming-of-age picture told with such heartstopping sensitivity that it instantly ranks amongst the best films ever made about childhood loss—that of our friendships, our innocence and, sometimes, those we…
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An intermittently intriguing exercise in designer depravity, Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, about a failed novelist on a seaside vacation turned tour of hell, is gripping fun until it isn’t. It has its merits—chiefly very good performances by Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth—but wears out…
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It’s that time of year again—when Oscar casts his golden glow on the highest achievements of the movie year (or at least those with the largest publicity budgets). Who made the list? Who was snubbed? What do the nominations tell us about who or…
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