As evidenced by his last two pictures, eighty-three-year-old British filmmaking legend Ken Loach’s social critiques are as sharp as ever, his eyes still keen to the injustices inflicted on the working poor and, thankfully, offer no indication of slowing down. In 2016, he charted…
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Benh Zeitlin’s Oscar-nominated, 2012 masterpiece Beasts of the Southern Wild was a preternaturally accomplished first feature, a richly evocative portrait of a young girl’s coming of age in a Louisiana delta that was part social, and part magical, realism. As a most deserving Best…
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The to-date best movie of 2020, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man is a smart, sleek thriller, and one with surprising psychological gravitas. Elizabeth Moss, the go-to for characters fraying under duress, etches out a compelling portrait of a domestic abuse victim trying to put…
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In Just Mercy, young, Harvard-educated attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) eschews a big law firm career in favor of starting a life-changing Alabama organization dedicated to exonerating wrongly accused death row inmates. It’s a strong, thoughtful and moving drama with as good an…
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When a picture is released in January featuring a big star minus any publicity, you know you’re in for a stinkeroo, and Kristin Stewart’s waterlogged Alien redux Underwater, the latest in a long line of creature features aping Ridley Scott’s 1979 suspense classic minus…
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Filmmaker Tom Harper on Flying High with The Aeronauts’ Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne Filmmaker Tom Harper is having quite a year, first with Wild Rose, about a Glasgow ex-con nursing a dream of becoming a Nashville country star, and now his new picture…
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The whodunnit may be an all-but-vanished American film genre, but Rian Johnson’s sensationally entertaining Knives Out serves as an affectionate revival. An exceedingly clever, highly skilled exercise in, well, fun, it would take a real grinch to poo-poo it. And why would anyone want…
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Trey Edwards Shults’ emotional Waves begins with a swirling camera capturing a moment ripped out of life, or time, in the romance of a south Florida teen couple who, for a brief moment, have what seems like about everything. They are young, smart, popular and…
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