8 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
Coming to a theater near you
“The Night Before” Feels Like A Rough Draft
Seth Rogen, our generation's pothead Peter Pan, is afraid to grow up again. Ever since his spot-on screenplay for Superbad (co-scripted with regular writing partner Evan Goldberg), Rogen has mined comedic gold from coming-of-age anxieties, whether high school ...
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“The Good Dinosaur” Is Pixar’s Most Beautiful Film Yet
Almost 10 years ago, Pixar Animation Studios established the high standard of photorealism in computer animation with Cars. The 2006 film is far from perfect (its story is thin, as are its characters), but its approximation of the American Southwest is a pinna...
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“Creed” Is A Career-Making Film For Michael B. Jordan
The most frustrating aspect of this summer’s Fantastic Four—aside from a poor script, spotty authorial oversight, scads of exposition that went nowhere, Kate Mara’s hilarious wig, and approximately 527 other things—was its gross misuse of one Michael B. Jordan...
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“Very Semi-Serious” Is Only Semi-Okay
Documentarian Leah Wolchok’s Very Semi-Serious is a semi-okay movie. It isn’t good. But it isn’t bad. It also, amazingly, isn’t just simply “there.” The film has perspective and an idea of what it wants to say. It’s also quite entertaining for the first hour. ...
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The “Secret In Their Eyes” Is That This Movie Is Ludicrous
Secret In Their Eyes is an American remake of the Oscar-winning Argentinian thriller The Secret in Their Eyes. Writer-director Billy Ray’s version drops the word “the” from its title but retains much of its predecessor’s plot. The film’s politics also get an A...
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“Mustang” Is Joyous, Beautiful, and Heartbreaking
It is not every day that phrases such as Islamic extremism and light-hearted fun can be used in the same sentence. Looking at the misogynistic, archaic thinking of religious communities through the lens of comedy is a tricky balance, and even more so for a deb...
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“Mockingjay — Part 2” Is Little More Than A Bland Feel-Good Tale
Yet again, splitting one book into multiple films proves to be a horrendous idea—artistically, that is: The two parts of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay will unquestionably make far more money than a single movie would have. It’s honestly surprising that a multi-...
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“Carol” Is A Hollow Exercise in Style
Carol is a well-made, technically proficient melodrama armed with a compulsive visual evocation of the time in which it is set. Director Todd Haynes’s latest is a sumptuous walk through the 1950s Spiegel catalog, taking its time to dote on and savor the shallo...
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“Entertainment” Is One of the Year’s Best Films
The idea of the sad clown is as old as comedy itself, and yet it’d be too easy to classify Rick Alverson’s new film—which revolves around the existential journey of a standup performer—as just another in the long line of stories about depressed funnymen and th...
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“The 33” Fails At Being Authentic
Patricia Riggen’s The 33 ends appropriately with a seaside reunion between its cast’s real-life counterparts: The cadre of Chilean miners who lived buried beneath a mountain for 69 days in the 2010 Copiapó mining calamity. One by one, Riggen introduces her aud...
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