James Franco’s The Disaster Artist is an unexpectedly near-great movie and one of the funniest pictures ever made about the process of making movies. In telling its loopy, endearing tale of ambition minus talent in Hollywood—of which there’s certainly no shortage—it manages to lampoon both…
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Frances McDormand gives an uncompromising performance in Martin McDonough’s blistering Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a corrosive battle cry of a movie that taps into dual rages—the primal pain of a parent mourning the death of a child and a rising antipathy against incompetent…
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If you haven’t seen Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (or read the novel, for that matter), then Kenneth Branagh’s sometimes entertaining new film version may just win you over. It’s a movie with a fine ensemble and enough…
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The new drama Thank You for Your Service is as powerfully written and acted an examination of the experience war veterans face upon returning home as the movies have seen in ages. It’s also an important one, which sounds perhaps hyperbolic, but it really…
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Cruelty inflicted as much on the audience as its characters, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is an absurdist nightmare, a morality play lacking any trace of recognizable human behavior and a chore to experience once you realize that director Yorgos Lanthimos is playing…
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Todd Haynes’ new picture Wonderstruck, about a pair of deaf children in different time periods making pilgrimages to Manhattan, is a curious disappointment with little cumulative dramatic impact. It strives for magic, wonder and to transport us, but as a story it never delivers…
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While many of us fondly recall Winne-the-Pooh as indelible nostalgia and a collection of some of the most enduring characters in all of children’s literature, far fewer are aware of the story’s bittersweet origins. In director Simon Curtis’ new picture, Goodbye Christopher Robin, an…
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One of the best studio movies of the year, Only the Brave is a movie about heroism, family and commitments that breathes life into a familiar movie formula, done here with terrific writing, acting and a genuinely gripping final act. It’s the type of…
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A portrait of childhood as an escape from the hard realities of socioeconomic misfortune and emotionally ill-equipped parents, Sean Baker’s The Florida Project is an observation of a handful of South Florida motel denizens trying their damndest to survive while their children somehow manage to…
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