Just in time for Halloween comes Argentine shocker When Evil Lurks, a nastily blunt and mostly effective picture deploying an escalating series of demonic possessions as a metaphor for contagion, community distrust and questionable parenting. Modestly scaled yet pungently atmospheric, it has enough tension…
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Stick to the plan. Anticipate, don’t improvise. Trust no one: Words to live by and a mantra for a best in the business assassin whose carefully constructed world crashes down after a botched hit in David Fincher’s superbly constructed thriller The Killer. Played with…
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In the 206-minute opus that is Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, the octogenarian maestro returns, exacting as ever, to his enduring six-decade career of thematically rich and technically complex canvases. In a picture about whether love and avarice can ever coexist, Scorsese…
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The Exorcist: Believer takes an earnest shot at updating a shopworn franchise that has not been good in a half-century. While it has a few things going for it, none of them, unfortunately, are in the horror department. The film is competently made with solid…
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Almodovar’s Strange Way of Life, a florid, 31-minute homage to spaghetti westerns wrapped up in an unabashedly sensuous bow, is both a genre tribute and mash-up delivered in high style and, courtesy of stars Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke, a romantic confection that leaves…
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I ventured into Saw X armed with only the faintest recollections of its inaugural 2004 original, which saw the light of day almost two decades ago at a time when the American horror film arena indulged in notions of “torture porn”—a subgenre in which…
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Gael García Bernal, the distinguished Mexican-born actor renowned for his exceptional early 2000s screen portraits in films such as Amores Perros, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también and Bad Education—all of which made him an internationally acclaimed movie star—triumphantly returns with his best…
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As a director, Kenneth Branagh is foremost a showman—in fact his subtlest picture was his poignant childhood memoir Belfast—so it comes as a bit of a surprise that his latest, A Haunting in Venice, very loosely based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party…
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Memo to The Nun II filmmakers: you had one job. If nothing else, a horror film must provide thrills. While the new sequel to the 2018 hit The Nun may look great, it is dull, overlong and scare-free. The eighth—yes, eighth—picture in “The Conjuring…
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Emma Seligman, whose 2020 debut Shiva Baby, a zinger of an anxious comedy about an aimless Manhattan collegiate “sugar baby” in an identity crisis during a shiva, turns impressive satirist with her sophomore picture Bottoms—a radically “queer” high school comedy that plays like a mash up…
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