Smart, stylish and enthralling, the artificial intelligence thriller Ex Machina fires on all cylinders as a first-rate piece of science fiction, superbly written, performed and mounted as the debut feature from screenwriter and first-time director Alex Garland. As science fiction, it employs some hard…
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Where are you in life versus where you thought you would be? Or perhaps where the world says you are supposed to be? Noah Baumbach’s refreshing While We’re Young is a Woody Allen-esque, sidewalks of New York comedy, but one that sparkles with insights…
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Good intentions do not a good movie make, and the well-meaning Desert Dancer, the true story of Iran’s Afshin Ghaffarian, who challenged his country’s ban on dancing by forming a clandestine dance troupe before being beaten down by Iran’s political climate and eventually escaping…
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Everything that worked in 2011’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel—a fully-lived in collection of senior characters going through crisis, reinvention, love and death played by a sterling cast of grand thesps investing a perfect blend of humor and pathos—is missing from its formulaic, by…
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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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