In her shock spectacle The Substance, Coralie Fargeat delivers a bold, blood-soaked critique of the absurd beauty standards imposed on modern women, powered by a trenchant Demi Moore as a discarded former Hollywood star who takes a black market fountain of youth drug with disastrous…
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In Azazel Jacobs’ intelligent, affecting His Three Daughters, a trio of wayward adult siblings gather for the most painful of reasons—to navigate their stricken father’s waning days. It’s a premise worthy of Ingmar Bergman, and the movie, a confined chamber piece featuring open-wound turns…
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Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. These lyrics strike a perfect chord at a key moment in J.T. Mollner’s twisty thriller Strange Darling, one of the most inventive films of 2024. It plays a cunning game with its audience, luring…
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A friend recently wondered if “the pendulum had begun to swing back” on the #MeToo movement that exploded in 2017, a righteous anger bullet of delayed justice for scores of men behaving badly. Certainly not according to Blink Twice, actress turned filmmaker Zoë Kravitz’s…
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The idea of human transformation often feels remote, especially when we think about the incarcerated. We tend to see their lives as grim realities, grateful that we’re not in their shoes, and seldom do we stop to consider the forces—both personal and social—that continually…
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There are two films competing in director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus—the first an impeccably designed technical nod to Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens, recreated with meticulous reverence. But the second is a story that’s little more than a riff on…
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For all the whirlwind menace on display in Twisters, a reboot of the silly-fun 1996 summer hit about storm chasers braving heartland funnel clouds (and most famous for an airborne cow), Minari director Lee Isaac Chung’s high-tech new update also has a swirling black…
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The arrival of Longlegs—Osgood Perkins’ killer thriller about an FBI agent tracking a murderer—comes on the heels of distributor A24’s canny, months-long marketing campaign of carefully curated raves raising high hopes that just maybe a new horror “masterpiece” would be unleashed. But landing…
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In Nicole Riegel’s new Dandelion (IFC Films, July 21), star Kiki Layne plays a not-so-young Cincinnati musician fiercely committed to doing things her way, and to finding a home onstage that is uniquely hers across spaces that are not always welcoming to Black female…
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A few months ago, Ti West’s MaXXXine dropped a ripping good trailer promising the lurid thrills of adult film actress Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), stalked by a Hollywood slasher in a perfectly recreated 1985 Tinseltown milieu. But the film’s arrival proves a disappointment, West…
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