8 years ago
Theatrical (10 posts found)
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“Miss You Already” Is The Rare Honest Tearjerker
However horrible it most assuredly is in real life, dying of a debilitating disease often looks quite lovely in motion pictures. The afflicted tend to become blessed with infinite wisdom and generosity, bestowing advice upon those left behind as they beatifica...
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“Heist” Is A Brazenly Derivative, Time-Killing Knockoff
Robert De Niro vapes in Heist, which I guess is almost as much a sign of changing times as Robert De Niro even appearing in a film like this at all. Following The Bag Man and Freelancers, Heist is the latest of the cinema legend’s straight-to-video throwaways ...
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“James White” Is A Revelation
James White opens on an extreme close-up of the titular character (Christopher Abbott), sweaty-faced and dazed-eyed, earphones in, vaguely moving about to music, back-lit by neon smears. He emerges from a bar into broad daylight, gets into a cab, takes a coupl...
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“Spectre” Is Workmanlike Filmmaking
The best Bond films were wise enough not to take themselves too seriously, generally aware that they were selling a fantasy package of moral escapism, aspirational heterosexuality and killer theme tunes, the majority of which have endured as richer cultural ar...
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“The Peanuts Movie” Is A Respectful Love Letter to Fans
The Peanuts Movie is a love letter to fans and a respectful ode to creator Charles Schulz’s timeless characters. It neither embraces the current trend of justifying and explaining every element that made its subject so beloved, nor does it stitch the diminishi...
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“Spotlight” Is An Exceptional Ode To Journalism
In 2002, The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team—consisting of a group of top-notch investigative journalists—unveiled the deeply rooted, systemic sexual abuse of children within the Catholic Church, which led to the surfacing of many molestation cases across the US...
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“Trumbo” Is Unworthy of Its Extraordinary Subject
In a screenwriting career that spanned three decades, the man born James Dalton Trumbo did a little of everything. He penned feather-light romances like Roman Holiday, sweeping war pictures such as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a swords-and-sandals epic in Sparta...
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“The Hallow” Is Chillingly Effective
If you’re the type of person who avoids setting foot in a forest, you’ll probably feel validated by The Hallow, the debut from Irish filmmaker Corin Hardy. This is a horror film that treats the natural world as a source of mortal danger. Here there be monsters...
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“Brooklyn” Is Tasteful, Competent, and Utterly Harmless
It’s 1951, and young Irishwoman Eilis Lacey (Saoirse Ronan) is moving to America. She hugs her mother and sister goodbye, goes through some trouble on the boat trip across the Atlantic, and ultimately settles in—you guessed it, Brooklyn. Between dealing with a...
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“In Jackson Heights” Is Galvanizing and Unsettling
The opening rooftop shot of In Jackson Heights gazes down at a street block that contains several intersections within a short distance. It’s as much an indication of the New York community’s overlapping cultures as the subsequent montage of life in the area, ...
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