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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In today’s overly cautious culture of political correctness, it’s refreshing to have a subversive comedy of all-out annihilation. Bad Words, loaded with uproariously mean-spirited jokes in service of a genuinely creepy character (albeit one played by a likable movie star), takes no prisoners in its…
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Whatever the appeal of Veronica Mars may have been on the small screen, it is wholly lost on the big screen version of the same name, a lackluster movie that plays like a television show loaded with in-jokes, hijinks and cardboard characters, and a…
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If you come away from Shana Feste’s Endless Love with nothing else, you’ll have seen two beautiful people with beautiful bodies in beautiful settings and, for a brief time at the beginning of the picture, some beautiful moments of falling into first love. In…
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