I recently caught up with writer-director Derek Cianfrance in Chicago on a bright fall afternoon on the eve of the premiere of his surprisingly tender new film, Roofman — a story about an escaped convict whose humanity becomes both his undoing and his redemption.…
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By now we well know the story of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which has been around in various incarnations for the better part of a half century since Manuel Puig first published his award-winning 1976 novel. But what a story it is, and…
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The best that can be said about Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine is that Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt give it everything they’ve got. If only they were able to elevate the material in Safdie’s solo directorial debut, an insular and small-scaled film that…
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In Twinless, two young men meet in a support group for surviving halves of twin siblings and quickly develop a connection. Pretty good topic for a movie, right? Yet that setup is not quite what writer-director James Sweeney (Straight Up) has on his mind…
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In Bing Liu’s Preparation for the Next Life, a young woman and man cross paths by chance in New York City and soon plunge into a love that will be tested, though not always in the ways we might expect. That couple—an undocumented Uyghur…
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Jay Duplass’ The Baltimorons is the kind of movie that starts amiable and amusing only to sneak up on you with surprising feeling. It’s been a remarkably strong year for small, handmade indies (Friendship, A Little Prayer, Splitsville, Twinless, Preparation for the Next Life),…
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Bing Liu has built a pair of terrific films around the question of how young people come of age when the odds are stacked against them. His Oscar-nominated 2018 doc Minding the Gap charted several years in the lives of three skateboarding friends in…
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It’s been awhile since Darren Aronofsky delivered a film as sharp as Caught Stealing, his most commercial-friendly outing yet and an unexpected late-summer surprise. Working from Charlie Huston’s screenplay of his own novel, Aronofsky shapes a gritty and unpredictable New York crime tale that…
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A comedy has one job—to make you laugh—and if it fires off a gag a minute and you only chuckle a handful of times, it isn’t working. By that barometer, the new Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson in the deadpan Police Squad! mode…
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If you grew up as a teen boy in the 1980s and had even a cursory interest in movies, you surely fell in love with the horror movie renaissance that shaped the first half of that decade (and is still imitated, reconfigured and meta-ed…
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