Across four films, 38-year-old writer-director Ari Aster has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. Breaking out with 2018’s trauma thriller Hereditary and 2019’s pagan horror Midsommar, Aster took a turn with the surreal 2023 panic attack Beau Is Afraid. Tonally disparate but thematically linked,…
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Writer-director Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival screenwriting prize, is a deceptively modest indie, one made in spare style but delivering a quietly powerful punch in confronting the long-term fallout of sexual assault. Trauma splits life into a before…
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F1, the thunderous (read: loud) new Brad Pitt racing movie, is really two vehicles—one built for its star, the other for the track. It performs better in the first lane. Director Joseph Kosinski, who launched Top Gun: Maverick to a $1.5 billion global box office and…
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After the glowing reception for her Oscar-nominated 2023 debut Past Lives, Celine Song could have easily followed up with a crowd-pleasing hit that “checks all the boxes”—a phrase her new film, Materialists, uses not-so-ironically to describe the modern partner checklist. Funny? Check. Smart? Check.…
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Ballerina, in which Ana de Armas spends two hours enthusiastically handing out and receiving beatdowns, is hitting theaters with a jumbo official title: From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Given its reportedly chaotic production of delays, reshoots and budget overruns, you can hardly…
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Two summers ago Danny and Michael Philippou made a striking horror debut with Talk to Me, their scary possession thriller about teens summoning spirits via the creepy severed hand of a dead psychic. Fun and fresh, audiences responded to the tune of $100 million global…
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Tom Cruise and writer-director Christopher McQuarrie return for what feels like a culminating chapter in Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the $400 million follow-up to 2023’s Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part 1. But while the 2023 installment ranked as one of the series’ most fast-paced and…
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Why do adult men often struggle to make friends with other men? Such fraught camaraderie dynamics inform writer-director Andrew DeYoung’s black comedy Friendship, in which an ill-fated bromance makes for an observant movie which, like the great human comedies, mines hilarity from humiliation and…
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It’s been 25 years since Final Destination first arrived on screens, its crafty (and best) 2000 original ushering in a popular franchise predicated on elaborately contrived mayhem and driven by grim musings on mortality and fate. Fourteen years have passed since the last installment, which makes…
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On Swift Horses, a period melodrama about hidden love and sexual identity in 1950s America, is so tasteful it makes you wish it would cut loose with the abandon its characters experience in their frequently heated moments of self-discovery. Featuring an attractive cast led…
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