Trai Byers, the Yale-trained grad currently starring on Fox's surprise hit Empire, which has dominated ratings for seven straight weeks, is having a moment. With the one-two punch of a featured role in the Oscar-nominated Selma and now a high-profile turn as the CFO…
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Colm Feore’s towering, career-defining work as King Lear in Stratford Festival’s currently playing movie adaptation of last summer’s theatrical production is a raw, powerful portrait of Lear as a man of family and state, in that order, a younger and more vigorously vital patriarch…
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Prolific Hollywood screenwriter and director Richard LaGravenese’s new picture, the bittersweet The Last Five Years, based on the off-Broadway musical and starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan as young Manhattan transplants who fall into and out of careers, love and life together, was a…
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Part Zalman King soft core, part David Cronenberg mind fuck and all ludicrously misguided, the stylish S&M fantasia Fifty Shades of Grey is being marketed as a young adult love story—just in time for Valentine’s Day—and as such, one wonders just what sort of…
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Kevin Costner’s conflicted, weary performance as an LA attorney embroiled in a battle for custody of his bi-racial granddaughter is the best of several strong suits in Black or White, writer-director Mike Binder’s thoughtful examination of parenthood, race and identity. While not a perfect…
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Black Sea, the new submarine thriller starring Jude Law as a disenfranchised former captain looking for a payday—and redemption—by treasure hunting for sunken gold, is a fast-paced, well-acted and mostly thoughtful movie wound tightly by Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald. Law stars as a career…
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There isn’t a more affable star than Oscar-winner Kevin Costner, the iconic actor-director with so many modern classics in his canon—Dances with Wolves, JFK, Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, A Perfect World—and an artist who brings a patented movie star sheen to every performance.…
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Thanks to director Kevin Macdonald’s tense, tight-quartered new submarine thriller Black Sea, we now know exactly what it feels like to be trapped on the bottom of the ocean at death’s door, mortality staring us in the face, survival chances slim. The movie presents…
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A hard boiled saga of capitalism, crime and family cira 1981 New York City, J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year is a high-order throwback to Sidney Lumet’s social urban dramas of the 70s, a sensationally written and directed movie about a beleaguered businessman (Oscar…
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American Sniper, an acceptable if lesser Clint Eastwood picture based on Navy SEAL Chris Kyle’s memoir of four tours in Iraq, is a movie with a lot going for it. It’s got Eastwood at the helm delivering a sometimes muscular movie with modern political…
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