The most important thing to know about Star Wars: The Force Awakens is that it returns a sense of fun to a floundering franchise—one that also happens to be the best loved movie property in history. With two new characters and a handful of…
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Eddie Redmayne gives the year’s best male performance in The Danish Girl, a fascinating portrait of real-life transgender pioneer Lile Elbe, the Danish painter who came to realize that her gender identity and physical body were incongruous and who, with neither the acceptance of…
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As an audacious warning alarm about Black-on-Black violence in Chicago and using every tool in his arsenal, Spike Lee’s high-wire act Chi-Raq is many things—social parable wrapped in sex satire piqued with music, spoken verse, direct address, set pieces, lavish color, high comedy and…
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It may not have been necessary, but Billy Ray’s Secret in Their Eyes, a remake of the Oscar winning 2009 Argentine mystery about politics, love and a murder that takes its toll on a handful of inextricably linked characters, is certainly not without merit.…
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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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