7 years ago
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“A Most Violent Year”
Watching JC Chandor’s expertly crafted period crime drama A Most Violent Year, it’s likely you’ll say to yourself, “this is good, but I feel like I’ve seen it before.” This is an understandable reaction, and one that might even persist after the film’s explosi...
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Stuck in the Middle with You: Defending “Tammy”
When considering the inherent biases of film critics, we usually think about race and gender first. Despite some progress made in the last few years, the vast majority of critics are still white and male. At least this is a fixable problem, although it will su...
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Mousterpiece Cinema, Episode 177: “Into the Woods”
As we say goodbye to 2014, friends, it's time to venture into the world of musicals on Mousterpiece Cinema once more. In fact, you might say Josh and Gabe are headed into the woods/it's time to go/we hate to leave/ we have to, though/Into the woods/it's time t...
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“Leviathan”
Leviathan, the pitch-black new film from Elena director Andrey Zvyagintsev, is bookended by montages of startling, almost cosmically withering imagery. Chilled to prehistoric temperature in the blues and grays of Mikhail Krichman’s photography, it opens wide i...
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2014 Movies: The Miscellaneous Data
Anyone can tell you which movie made the most money this year (Guardians of the Galaxy), or which wide release had the highest Rotten Tomatoes score (Boyhood), or whether Sinbad was in anything (no). But who cares about that? We've compiled the details that tr...
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Once More, With Feeling: The Best Film Restorations of 2014
It's time to kiss 2014 goodbye (or kick its ass out the door, depending on how well your year went) and furiously compile our Best-Of lists, as film people are wont to do. Obviously most people focus on ranking the best new releases of the year ("release" bein...
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The Best Film Writing of 2014
As the year 2014 comes to a close, it offers time to reflect on the past twelve months in popular culture. Whether it was big moments in our nation such as Ferguson, the Ebola outbreak, or a cyber attack, we had plenty of trouble this year. We also lost some f...
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Video Essay: Asghar Farhadi – Life & Cinema
Tina Hassannia's new book, Asghar Farhadi: Life and Cinema, is the first major study of this important Iranian filmmaker, director of such films as the Academy-Award winning A Separation. In this video essay, Hassannia explores the moral questions Farhadi rais...
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“Big Eyes”
The anarchic id of late-20th-century Hollywood with a funhouse of singular films to prove it, Tim Burton hasn’t, alas, been regarded with much favor of late. Indifferent to the notion of growing up, he’s become the whipping boy for critics who’ve mistaken an a...
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“Into The Woods”
Into The Woods is excellent proof that we, as a society, need to rise up and stop Rob Marshall from directing a movie ever again. This long-gestating adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical, a knowing and prescient blend of fairy tale characters from Cinder...
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