The Hollywood blacklist gets a superfluous treatment in Jay Roach’s Trumbo, a too much, not enough examination of Tinseltown careers destroyed by MCarthy-era communist witch hunts, and one—screenwriter Dalton Trumbo—who rose from the ashes even while his personal spoils lingered. As directed by Roach,…
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Director Sarah Gavron has taken what might have been a tony period piece about women standing up to oppression in 1912 London and fashioned an urgent, immediate and gripping war movie about loss and sacrifice. It’s a battle, Suffragette says, to effect social and…
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Sandra Bullock is the world’s savviest political consultant in David Gordon Green’s underwhelming satire Our Brand is Crisis, a picture so telegraphed and unenlightening that its biggest crime, ultimately, is merely playing it safe, edgy as it thinks it is. There is nothing new…
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Of the many pleasures writer/director Paul Weitz delivers in his terrific new movie, Grandma, starring a Lily Tomlin in a performance for the ages as a broke, lesbian poetess reconciling her past after her eighteen-year-old granddaughter shows up seeking help with an abortion, is…
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What does it mean to be truly tested? Perhaps what scares you may be the only way to find out, a familiar theme for filmmakers John Erick and Drew Dowdle, the successful brother act who have delivered an impressive slate of horror pictures including…
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The pleasure of meeting Greta Gerwig is all about energy. Her energy, that is. Just sitting casually across from you on a sofa, as she is today with me during a chat at Chicago’s Park Hyatt hotel, the screenwriter and actress radiates a sort…
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The exhilaration of Straight Outta Compton, one of the year’s best movies, is that of a good story, well-told with vivid performances and a stirring, contemporary sociopolitical context. Charting the rise, fall and rise of seminal hip hop forerunners N.W.A., director F. Gary Gray…
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