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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By now we well know the story of Kiss of the Spider Woman, which has been around in various incarnations for the better part of a half century since Manuel Puig first published his award-winning 1976 novel. But what a story it is, and…
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The best that can be said about Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine is that Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt give it everything they’ve got. If only they were able to elevate the material in Safdie’s solo directorial debut, an insular and small-scaled film that…
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In Twinless, two young men meet in a support group for surviving halves of twin siblings and quickly develop a connection. Pretty good topic for a movie, right? Yet that setup is not quite what writer-director James Sweeney (Straight Up) has on his mind…
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In Bing Liu’s Preparation for the Next Life, a young woman and man cross paths by chance in New York City and soon plunge into a love that will be tested, though not always in the ways we might expect. That couple—an undocumented Uyghur…
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