In News of the World, based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles about a Civil War vet roaming the Old West performing the news of the day to paying crowds in tiny towns across Texas, there is something almost comforting in the simple…
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Has enough time truly passed to reboot 2003’s backwoods horror hit Wrong Turn (which itself aped scores of earlier films with the same general story)? Modest points in this version go to screenwriter Alan McElroy and director Mike P. Nelson who competently mount a…
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As a targeted piece of provocation, Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman is a zeitgeist bullseye. A scathing condemnation of rape culture pitched as a darkly comic thriller for the #MeToo era, it features a never better Carey Mulligan as an avenging angel on a…
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The chief reason to see Another Round is a terrific performance from Mads Mikkelsen, teaming up once again with The Hunt director Thomas Vinterberg for a Danish drama with a provocative premise—what if the answer to a mid-life crisis is to forego antidepressants and…
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Netflix and Ryan Murphy’s exuberant new movie adaptation of the 2016 Broadway hit The Prom, about a troupe of down-on-their-luck Broadway babies turned social justice warriors swooping into rural Indiana to save a high school prom from cancellation, is a broad, tongue-firmly-in-cheek confection both…
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Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s movie version of 2016’s heralded cultural anthropology epic Hilbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family In Crisis, is a sum-of-its-parts picture and reductive adaptation which, often in spite of itself, has strong enough performances to ultimately be compelling. And that’s…
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Kevin Costner and Diane Lane are sensational in the fine Western thriller Let Him Go, in which they play a retired, small-town Montana cop and headstrong wife who inadvertently run afoul of a nefarious crime family, led by a hardboiled Lesley Manville. As directed…
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Bleak, unrelenting and essential, The Painted Bird, a house of horrors disguised as a movie, is a picture of such blunt raw force that, the story goes, it drove viewers for the exits at film festivals late last year (though Václav Marhoul, the film’s…
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The “time-loop” comedy Palm Springs, lauded since its Sundance debut earlier this year, is a broad, anything goes gimmick with two likable actors in a movie that prizes contrived cleverness over all else, including honest laughs and its likable leads, who deserve a better…
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