The whodunnit may be an all-but-vanished American film genre, but Rian Johnson’s sensationally entertaining Knives Out serves as an affectionate revival. An exceedingly clever, highly skilled exercise in, well, fun, it would take a real grinch to poo-poo it. And why would anyone want…
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Trey Edwards Shults’ emotional Waves begins with a swirling camera capturing a moment ripped out of life, or time, in the romance of a south Florida teen couple who, for a brief moment, have what seems like about everything. They are young, smart, popular and…
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What a sad, rich movie Noah Baumbach has fashioned with Marriage Story, about a New York theater director and actress who call it quits after their personal and creative partnership has run its course. A semi-autobiographical, remarkably perceptive picture about the emotional spoils of…
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If Martin Scorsese never makes another mob picture (at least in the formal sense), his new magnum opus, The Irishman, might possibly be the final movie word on the subject. Certainly amongst the finest in an oeuvre that includes masterworks like Goodfellas and The…
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I suppose those longing for nostalgia might take a shine, if you’ll pardon the pun, to Doctor Sleep, the new movie sequel to The Shining, which spins a triptych of tales that converge in an expected, and unsatisfying, fan service climax. But for most, I suspect,…
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It’s sometimes referred to as a once-in-a-generation talent. And it would not be an overstatement to say that nineteen-year-old New Zealand actress Thomasin Mckenzie, currently on screens in Taika Waititi’s jaunty wartime satire Jojo Rabbit and the gritty, Henry V monarchy drama The King,…
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Everything you’ve heard about the Cannes-celebrated Parasite, or perhaps more pointedly, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Seoul, is tenfold true. A savage, toothy satire about social class, or more specifically, about the resourcefulness and eventual uprising of the underclass, it’s a picture that…
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Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood—a gorgeous evocation of 1969 Los Angeles and bittersweet elegy for falling Hollywood stars and the passing of a definitive American era—is the work of an artist at the peak of his powers, which, if you believe him,…
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