It’s been awhile since Darren Aronofsky delivered a film as sharp as Caught Stealing, his most commercial-friendly outing yet and an unexpected late-summer surprise. Working from Charlie Huston’s screenplay of his own novel, Aronofsky shapes a gritty and unpredictable New York crime tale that…
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A comedy has one job—to make you laugh—and if it fires off a gag a minute and you only chuckle a handful of times, it isn’t working. By that barometer, the new Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson in the deadpan Police Squad! mode…
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If you grew up as a teen boy in the 1980s and had even a cursory interest in movies, you surely fell in love with the horror movie renaissance that shaped the first half of that decade (and is still imitated, reconfigured and meta-ed…
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In their new film She Rides Shotgun, director Nick Rowland and actor Taron Egerton deliver a tense experience fusing the grit and danger of a crime picture with the vulnerability of a fractured father-daughter relationship. Adapted from the novel by Jordan Harper, the story…
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Nostalgia can be a wonderfully horrible thing, especially when what’s being romanticized rarely lines up with reality. Such is the case with the new I Know What You Did Last Summer, an attempt to resurrect a ’90s slasher franchise that was competent enough, sure—but…
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Ari Aster’s Eddington is unlike anything else this year in its sprawling attempt to reckon with the fractured state of American life in 2020. Set in a fictional town in New Mexico, the film follows a slow-burning conflict between a conservative sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix)…
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Across four films, 38-year-old writer-director Ari Aster has emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in American cinema. Breaking out with 2018’s trauma thriller Hereditary and 2019’s pagan horror Midsommar, Aster took a turn with the surreal 2023 panic attack Beau Is Afraid. Tonally disparate but thematically linked,…
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Writer-director Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, winner of this year’s Sundance Film Festival screenwriting prize, is a deceptively modest indie, one made in spare style but delivering a quietly powerful punch in confronting the long-term fallout of sexual assault. Trauma splits life into a before…
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F1, the thunderous (read: loud) new Brad Pitt racing movie, is really two vehicles—one built for its star, the other for the track. It performs better in the first lane. Director Joseph Kosinski, who launched Top Gun: Maverick to a $1.5 billion global box office and…
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After the glowing reception for her Oscar-nominated 2023 debut Past Lives, Celine Song could have easily followed up with a crowd-pleasing hit that “checks all the boxes”—a phrase her new film, Materialists, uses not-so-ironically to describe the modern partner checklist. Funny? Check. Smart? Check.…
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