The cast includes Christoph Waltz, Willem Dafoe, and Rachel Brosnahan, and it was written and directed by Walter Hill (‘Alien’, ‘48Hrs.’), but this thing can’t seem to get so much as a spark lit throughout the entirety of its two-hour runtime. Ostensibly a gritty Western about revenge and bounty hunting, […]
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Vesper
As bleak and dystopian as ‘The Road’ and ‘Children of Men’, this future-set film about one girl’s fight to survive after the collapse of the global ecosystem is a slow burn of a cautionary tale cloaked as a bit of sci-fi wonder. Written and directed by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno […]
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Into the Deep
As captivating a documentary as you’re likely to find, this chronicle of the 2017 murder of journalist Kim Wall at the hands of eccentric Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen is a study on how to deliberately let a headline-grabbing story unfold. Australian Emma Sullivan happened to be making a film about […]
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My Best Friend’s Exorcism
Over the course of 13 years and 1,400 reviews, I’ve obviously run into quite a few stinkers along the way. (2011’s ‘Your Highness’, 2018’s ‘The Happytime Murders’, and 2019’s ‘Serenity’ stand out.) Let’s add this piece of ridiculously awful garbage to the list, too, shall we? Based on the (admittedly […]
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Luckiest Girl Alive
Based on the best-selling novel by Jessica Knoll (who also wrote the screenplay), this pulpy drama stars Mila Kunis as a boarding school rape victim who also survived a school shooting and is now dealing with the fallout. Despite Kunis’ hefty (and possibly career-best) performance, it’s tough to shake the […]
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The Greatest Beer Run Ever
Based on a true story, this tale of a Merchant Mariner who decides to head to Vietnam in the middle of the war, just to deliver beers to his buddies from the neighborhood, suffers from a wildly uneven (and often preachy) script. Zac Efron, continuing to prove that he’s far […]
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Lou
At its core, ‘Lou’ is a simple cat-and-mouse caper, but in the hands of director Anna Foerster and a solid cast—including Allison Janney, Jurnee Smollett, and Logan Marshall-Green—it rises above expectations to arrive as a sufficiently white-knuckle thriller. It’s not often that a 60-year-old woman leads the show in a […]
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Don’t Worry Darling
With all the buzz and controversy surrounding it in the weeks leading up to its release, it would be easy to say that ‘Darling’ just couldn’t get out of its own way, but it turns out it’s just not a very good movie in its own right. Director Olivia Wilde […]
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Catherine Called Birdy
Lena Dunham adapted and directed this clever period piece about a young woman (Bella Ramsey, ‘Game of Thrones’) in 13th century England whose father (Andrew Scott) needs to marry her off for a dowry. Part broad comedy, part coming-of-age drama, the wild mash-up of reimagined 90s tunes and Medieval times […]
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Nothing Compares
In what may be one of the more unfortunate (and ultimately horrifically misguided) ‘cancelings’ of the late 20th century, powerhouse Sinead O’Connor saw her star snuffed out because she chose to stand up and call out the tragic crimes perpetrated by the Catholic Church. It’s much too little too late, […]
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