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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2014 wasn’t what you might call a great year in film, though it was a respectable one of solid enough pictures, if only a few truly inspired much passion. And while most of the below won’t be taking home Academy Awards in February, my…
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Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s long-awaited adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, the extraordinary story of World War II vet and former Olympian Louis Zamperini’s experiences surviving Japanese POW camps, is a crushing movie disappointment. What should…
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Director Rob Marshall and Disney had high expectations and a bit of skepticism riding on their adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s beloved 1986 musical Into the Woods, and what initially seemed an unwieldy combination—a fractured trio of fairy tales where love doesn’t…
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Few pictures this season reach the complexity and substance of The Imitation Game, the story of Alan Turning, the genius mathematician plucked from Cambridge to assemble a crack team of code breakers and decipher Enigma, the German communications waging World War II. From the…
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We know how he did it—on January 26, 1996, billionaire eccentric John Eleuthere du Pont shot and killed, in cold blood, Olympic wrestler and gold medalist Dave Schultz. But why did he? Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s arresting new picture on the subject, has some very…
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The Theory of Everything is both a fascinating biopic of renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and a complex love story told from the perspective of Hawking’s long-suffering wife, Jane, whose memoirs informed this portrait of a marriage that nearly made it through everything, and two…
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An imperfect masterwork still qualifies as one, and Christopher Nolan’s transcendent magnum opus Interstellar is perhaps the most thematically and technically ambitious mainstream movie in memory, one so demanding for its 169-minute running time that at times it feels like a final exam, but…
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Birdman, Alejandro Gonzalez-Inarritu’s audacious backstage redemption tale, is at once an incisive portrait of the artistic ego and a rage against the dying of the (spot)light, a personal movie about art as savior, second chances, aging, irrelevance and an indictment of a fickle industry…
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