Film Reviews

Latest Reviews

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  Chalamet, Carell Face Cycles of Addiction in Tender Beautiful Boy

  Chuck Wilson | October 22 at 6 a.m.

  For Nic and his family, rehab becomes sobriety becomes relapse, a pitiless cycle of hope and disappointment too many of us will experience at one time or another, either as addict or loved one

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  What They Had

  Alan Scherstuhl | October 19 at 12 a.m.

  It's clever, perhaps, of What They Had's squabbling family to be no more engaging than most real people's, but that makes the film a tough sit. This brittle and cantankerous comic drama, written and directed by actress Elizabeth Chomko and...

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  Jamie Lee Curtis Rules, but the New Halloween Works Against Her

  April Wolfe | October 17 at 7 a.m.

  We meet Laurie in her super-sealed woodsy compound, almost 40 years to the day after the murders that took place in 1978 — this film negates all the previous Halloween sequels

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  Danish Thriller The Guilty Dazzles Without Ever Leaving a Call Center

  Bilge Ebiri | October 15 at 7 a.m.

  Pretty much the whole film consists of phone exchanges between Asger Holm (Jakob Cedergren), a police officer who has been temporarily demoted to working the phones, and others out in the field as he struggles to save a woman who is being...

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  Jonah Hill’s Mid90s Takes an Honest Plunge Into the Millennial Past

  Kristen Yoonsoo Kim | October 16 at 7 a.m.

  The depictions of drug and alcohol use, sex (Stevie getting it on with an older girl) and violence (both self-inflicted and by others) are difficult to watch, as Hill brings a fly-on-the-wall candor to his depiction of youth and the film’s era

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  Thanksgiving-Ruining Comedy The Oath Makes America Funny Again

  Alan Scherstuhl | October 15 at 7 a.m.

  That impulse — to continually stoke our fury with Twitter takes, cable news shouters and breaking news updates — gets lanced throughout The Oath, which writer-director-star Barinholtz has set in a now just as fevered as ours

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  Bad Times at the El Royale

  Alan Scherstuhl | October 12 at 12 a.m.

  As with many puzzle-box entertainments, Drew Goddard's Bad Times at the El Royale proves more satisfying in its teasing buildup than its eventual payoffs. Bad Times is a much better time in its mysterious middle, which tingles with...

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  Venom

  Bilge Ebiri | October 12 at 12 a.m.

  There’s nothing wrong with the idea of Venom, a sci-fi split-personality comedy featuring Tom Hardy doing psychic battle with a pissy, parasitic intergalactic symbiote that at least promises a welcome dose of what-the-fuck fun in a...

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  First Man

  Bilge Ebiri | October 12 at 12 a.m.

  The moon is both a memory and a dream-quest in First Man, Damien Chazelle's epic about the life of Neil Armstrong. A tense, terse drama that plunges us headlong and handheld into the high-risk world of the space race in the 1960s, the film...