In 1987, Colorado senator and surefire 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Gary Hart’s bright political future was handily extinguished by allegations of extramarital impropriety with Donna Rice—we’ve all seen the famous photo—and Hart went from popular man of the people to political pariah in a…
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Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased, one of the year’s best-acted movies, is an “issue” movie done so well it far surpasses another well-meaning, troubled teen picture this season. Both movies are about real-life teens in crisis—one forced into gay conversion “therapy,” the other in the…
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“No one in their right mind would do what you do,” journalist Marie Colvin is told late in A Private War, an absorbing character study of a woman who lived, and not always fearlessly, in harm’s way on the front lines of the bloodiest…
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The mystique of Lisbeth Salander—that iconic, proto-feminist hacker turned crusader against the evil that men do—has been mostly sidelined in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a disappointingly routine action picture that miscalculates by diminishing Salander’s knife-edged persona, her propensity for dispensing grim justice…
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In a society driven by competition with value placed on perfection, what puts someone at the top of the game? Is it genetics? Psychological composition? Nature or nurture? How do these relate to getting the most out of oneself mentally and physically? What quality…
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Ambition gets the best of an off-day Luca Guadagnino in his revisionist Suspiria, a leaden reimagining of Dario Argento’s phantasmagoric 1977 shocker about a witches’ coven at a prestigious German dance academy and the American student who discovers its secret. The story goes that…
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With features formed by a chisel and impeccably droll sophistication, Rupert Everett was, for a sustained run, a quintessential matinee idol whose visage thrust upon a forty-foot screen could remind one what movie stars could accomplish in their pictures, and us. A striking combination of…
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Felix von Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy takes a harrowing look at a family torn apart by meth addiction. Based on a true story—two of them, actually—and acted by a career high Steve Carell and a powerful Timothée Chalamet as father and son David and Nic…
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