Filmmaker Mona Fastvold’s unconventional The Testament of Ann Lee is a striking origin story of the Shaker religious movement, its titular founder played by Amanda Seyfried in an enigmatic portrait of emotional, physical and spiritual conviction. Set in the mid-1700s, Fastvold’s epic charts the…
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The degree to which Marty Supreme—Josh Safdie’s live-wire tale of American gumption and hustle, starring Timothée Chalamet in a career performance—works for you is likely to depend on how you feel about Chalamet himself. If you plug into the star’s rich commitment to craft, you’ll…
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Kleber Mendonça Filho’s films (Aquarius, Bacurau, Pictures of Ghosts) have always resisted easy classification, but The Secret Agent may be his most expansive work yet—a film that moves deftly between political thriller, character study and city symphony without ever announcing its shifts. Set in…
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There will be little middle ground on James Cameron’s thrilling Avatar: Fire and Ash; you’ll either find it richly transporting or, well, expected. Perhaps both. Sure, it’s what you think it is—a battle royale between tall blue beings and colonizing invaders loaded with dazzling…
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Hamnet arrives in theaters with quite a reputation preceding it—that of a movie with such elemental power that it shook fall film festival audiences to their cores, awash in tears. But does the power to make an audience cry—that primal, communal catharsis that movies…
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In Rental Family, Brendan Fraser plays an American ex-pat actor in Tokyo who signs on with an agency that supplies stand-in relatives and companions for hire. For Fraser’s Phillip, whose career in TV commercials has stalled, the job begins as harmless role-playing—until those scripted…
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The exquisite Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s hypnotic, dreamlike portrait of a common American life at the turn of the 20th century, is a lush evocation of a world and man in transition, anchored by a remarkable Joel Edgerton as a Pacific Northwest logger and…
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Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, finds the persecuted Iranian sociopolitical essayist back in strong form after No Bears landed him in back jail in 2022. Forbidden to make films in Iran,…
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After the Hunt, Luca Guadagnino’s portentous drama about a Yale professor caught up in a campus scandal, is one of the year’s big disappointments—an overwritten discourse that wastes a terrific cast by mistaking culture-war talking points for character, and topicality for drama. Nora Garrett’s…
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I recently caught up with writer-director Derek Cianfrance in Chicago on a bright fall afternoon on the eve of the premiere of his surprisingly tender new film, Roofman — a story about an escaped convict whose humanity becomes both his undoing and his redemption.…
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