It’s been some time since I’ve felt overwhelmed by a movie, or maybe just a character. Perhaps even longer since I fell in love with one. That happened a few days ago, and I think I still have butterflies. In the unabashedly tear-inducing movie…
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The main reason to see Maleficent, the new revisionist take on Sleeping Beauty featuring heavy doses of girl power and even more CGI, is its most special effect, a silky smooth performance by Angelina Jolie as the titular, anti-heroic villainess in spite of herself. Heretofore…
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Forget about it being a summer franchise picture, because X-Men: Days of Future Past is a thoughtful and thematically dense anti-blockbuster, a movie full of ideas that largely eschews huge action set-pieces through most of its running time in favor of a surprisingly compelling…
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A superfluous rehash of a much better movie, Brick Mansions is the limp American version of the terrific 2006 French action picture District B13, which was a scrappy surprise that introduced the uninitiated to the high-flying sport of parkour and its gravity-defying founder, Gallic…
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In three films—Tree of Life, Mud and now Joe—seventeen-year-old actor Tye Sheridan has carved out a niche as a rural teen that experiences lost innocence and disillusionment about the world by close examinations of his adult role models. Remarkably sensitive and without posture, Sheridan…
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Jonathan Glazer’s dark-pearled Under the Skin is an alternately fascinating and frustrating picture, an unequivocal triumph of mood and tone and an unfortunate letdown as a narrative. We know this much—Scarlett Johansson is an alien life form arriving on Earth (Scotland, to be exact,…
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Sensational The Raid 2 begins almost immediately after 2012’s The Raid, but that’s where the resemblance ends. The first picture, a perfectly acceptable Indonesian actioner—an orgiastic ballet of bullets, bodies and martial arts involving a pair of agile Jakarta SWAT cops laying waste to…
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The Raid 2: Berandal (meaning thug), is quite an accomplished movie, and one that took me by complete surprise. If you saw 2012’s The Raid, the scrappy story of two Jakarta SWAT cops who took down a cabal of drug pushers holed up in…
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