Once upon a time in Hollywood: People realized that people in movies would make people go to the movies. Not just anybody — certain people. People who had that thing, that indescribable quality that made film cameras love them and audiences love them even more. They settled on calling them …
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Whatever broad horizons are implied in the title of Infinite — the new Mark Wahlberg movie, adapted from D. Eric Maikranz’s novel The Reincarnationist Papers (2009) — the actual movie is a severely limited, undercooked affair. Its the story harkens to a familiar strain of superhuman origin tale: a man …
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Among the the music biopic‘s many tropes is the inevitable recording-session scene, where we watch a recreation of the artist at work — or, if the subject is a band, see them quarrel and throw drum sticks at each other. Rare, though, are the sequences where you feel as if …
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At first glance, Netflix‘s Ginny & Georgia seems like it was created by a streaming-service algorithm. The story of a single mom (Brianne Howey’s Georgia) and the precocious teenage daughter (Antonia Gentry’s Ginny) she had when she was a teen herself, it not only mimics the central premise of Gilmore …
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Behind Her Eyes, a bestselling thriller written by Sarah Pinborough, was marketed with its own hashtag, #WTFThatEnding, that can be interpreted two ways: as a lure convincing potential readers that they’ll be delighted by an unexpected conclusion, or as a warning that they’ll want to hurl the book across the …
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Steve McQueen’s Mangrove — which is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video — is an opening statement. The film is the first of a quintet of related-but-distinct feature films to be released on Amazon at the rate of one film per week. All five films, which range in style, tone, …
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Something strange is happening in New Orleans — even by Big Easy standards, it’s some bizarro shit. Young folks have been discovered all over the city in highly unusual situations, from being bitten by rare, non-regional snakes to dismembered at the bottom of elevator shafts. Odd bits of detritus (an …
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The guy with mask and the cape runs onstage, to the screams of thousands of people standing in Victoria Park on a characteristically brisk April day in 1978. He calls himself “Mr. Oligarchy,” but folks backstage — and some of the savvier people attending this outdoor concert — know him …
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Kajillionaire, the oddly charming new movie by Miranda July, is about a family trapped in a cycle of bad plans. There’s the curiously named Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) and her parents, Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert (Richard Jenkins), who named their daughter for a homeless man who won the …
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For starters, it’s no Harry Potter. But when Aretmis Fowl debuts on Disney + on June 12th, you’ll wonder why this fussed-over and broken film version of Irish author Eoin Colfer’s young-adult bestseller — about a 12-year-old criminal mastermind — had to be this dramatically inert and emotionally barren. Colfer …
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