Climax

Gaspar Noe’s Climax, about a troupe of young dancers whose group rehearsal goes spectacularly wrong after someone spikes their sangria with LSD, is a sensory overload of style and cool, a hypnotically absorbing head trip amounting to little yet an undeniably fun watch. Noe,…

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Rendezvous in Chicago

Love, in Michael Glover Smith’s buoyant roundelay Rendezvous in Chicago, doesn’t come easy for a handful of the city’s paramours, but when it does—it’s a treat for them, and us. In a sixty-nine-minute ensemble romantic comedy charting three couples meeting, committing and splitting, Smith…

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Vice

Adam McKay’s Vice races across several decades of recent American political history to contextualize how we have arrived at the disaster in which we are currently mired. It’s a movie that tells you upfront that its notoriously private subject—Dick Cheney—is all but impenetrable, but…

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Ben is Back

Julia Roberts pulls out all the stops in a career high performance—one that reminds us how much empathy we can have for an actor we hold dear—in Ben is Back, a searing look at the bond between a mother and son over 24-hours of…

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The Politics of Public, Private and Press: Filmmaker Jason Reitman Takes on The Front Runner Gary Hart, Media—and Us—in Campaign Drama

In 1987, Colorado senator and surefire 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart’s bright political future was handily extinguished by allegations of extramarital impropriety with Donna Rice—we’ve all seen the famous photo—and Hart went from popular man of the people to political pariah in a…

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Widows

Widows, one of the year’s most best movies, is a high stakes heist picture on Chicago’s meanest streets, but what’s so good about it is that it’s almost an “anti-heist” heist movie. By that I mean that its characters—led by a herculean Viola Davis…

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Boy Erased

Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, one of the year’s best-acted movies, is an “issue” movie done so well it far surpasses another well-meaning, troubled teen picture this season. Both movies are about real-life teens in crisis—one forced into gay conversion “therapy,” the other in the…

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