Feeling like a warm cup of tea on a crisp British morning, ‘Mrs. Harris’ arrives as perhaps one of the sweetest, funniest, and most charming films to grace screens in a while. Starring Lesley Manville, Isabelle Huppert, and Jason Isaacs, it’s a cheeky tale of lower-class folk giving posh folk […]
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Persuasion
West End director Carrie Cracknell makes her feature debut with the latest adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, which, despite decent intentions, never really gets off the ground. Dakota Johnson stars as Anne Elliot and manages to mostly pull off a British accent and also showcase some decent comic timing, […]
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Where the Crawdads Sing
Based on the bestselling novel by Delia Owen, this whodunnit-romance plays like a surprisingly solid mash-up of Nicholas Sparks and John Grisham. Daisy Edgar-Jones turns in a fine performance as Kya—the so-called Marsh Girl, who raises herself in a North Carolina swamp and finds herself accused of murder—and the evocative […]
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From Where They Stood
This harrowing documentary from French filmmaker Christophe Cognet chronicles life (and, more importantly, death) in several German concentration camps through the lens of the prisoners who secretly took photos themselves. Cognet exquisitely presents them as literal snapshots in time—a startling and eye-opening gut-punch reminder of the atrocities perpetuated at the […]
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Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
What started as a trilogy of clever, under-5-minute YouTube shorts a decade ago has quietly (and diligently) become one of the best and most surprising films of the year. Yes, it’s largely a stop-motion animated movie about a precocious, eloquent little shell with a googly eye and sneakers, but darn […]
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Thor: Love and Thunder
Not as memorable or as inventive as ‘Ragnarok’, the third Thor flick is still a solid, comedy-first/superhero-second effort from writer-director Taika Waititi. All hail the return of Natalie Portman as Jane, but the rest of the characters—including Thor himself and Christian Bale’s cartoonish villain Gorr the God Butcher—pale in comparison. […]
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Minions: The Rise of Gru
As loud as a six-year-old’s birthday party, as colorful as a bowl of radioactive Froot Loops, and as frenetic as a rave at a caffeine lovers convention, the sequel to 2015’s ‘Minions’ is an all-over-the-place world of craziness that might well leave some parents in the theater reaching for the […]
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The Princess
Mostly silly and occasionally downright preposterous, this Medieval actioner about a young princess fighting off the hordes of her evil, blood-thirsty betrothed still manages to work, if only at a base level. Joey King leads the way as the titular kick-ass in this largely real-time swashbuckler that relies more on […]
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2022 in Movies: The First Six Months
THE TOP 5 1. RRR Trust me when I say you’ve never seen anything like this before… and may never again. Set in 1920s India, this epic extravaganza tells the fictionalized story of two real-life revolutionaries and their battle against British rule. It is already the most watched non-English film […]
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The Man from Toronto
Take Kevin Hart’s ‘Central Intelligence’ and swap out Dwayne Johnson for Woody Harrelson, and you’re there… except it’s about hitmen, not spies. Hart yet again plays the woefully inadequate fish out of water and spends the better part of the film whining about how he can’t do certain tasks. Sure […]
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