Luc Besson’s epic folly Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a work of unbridled “creativity” that left me agog—and not happily—at its high-concept silliness performed with all the energy of rigor mortis by two sullen, miscast stars without clue what kind…
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The Marvel superhero franchise, labored with one picture after another churned out to capitalize on the individual and collective Avengers is as commoditized as American movies get. They don’t even have to be good. Except now there’s one that is, and it happens to…
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Sophia Coppola’s The Beguiled, for which she won the directing prize at Cannes this year, is a sum of its parts picture with enough going for it to recommend, but not quite enough to transcend its inherently pulpy story. But it sure is fun…
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Beatriz at Dinner may be a wisp of a movie—the credits roll at about the 70-minute mark—but it’s one that couldn’t feel more timely and tapped into the current zeitgeist of what it’s like to be a have or have not in contemporary America.…
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A rousing new superhero movie, which sounds like an oxymoron, is exactly what director Patty Jenkins has delivered in Wonder Woman, the new DC action hero picture that avoids the tropes of most superhero movies—over-the-top special effects, cynical calculation and bored performers—and signals the…
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Alien: Covenant is a turgid movie whose principal aim is to take down whatever is left of the Alien franchise, once so beloved—apparently for reasons the filmmakers no longer understand—since its inception in 1979. Instead, Ridley Scott and writers John Logan and Dante Harper…
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Debra Winger and Tracy Letts are a long-time married couple having affairs with other people in The Lovers, as incisive a portrait of marital discord as American movies have seen in years. What happens when you feel a long-dormant spark for the spouse you’re…
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How turn of the century British army officer ended up missing in the Amazon two decades later is the mystery of James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, an enigma of a movie that manages a unique paradox—it absorbs us even while it suspends…
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