Film Reviews

Latest Reviews

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  Welcome to Marwen Crashes Into the Limits of Hollywood’s Imagination

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 21 at 1:37 p.m.

  At times, as it dissolves between scenes of its cast as literal toy dolls machine-gunning Nazis in the made-up Belgian town of Marwen, Zemeckis’ movie seems an inquisition into the limits of the director’s own imagination

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  Vice Can’t Make Sense of Dick Cheney, but It Can Give You a Headache

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 25 at 7 a.m.

  Don’t look to Vice for psychology or even a sense of presence; McKay uses the Cheneys’ grim unknowability as an excuse not to bother going for either

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  On the Basis of Sex Shrewdly Makes RBG Into a Feminist Jimmy Stewart

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 25 at 6 a.m.

  Leder’s film mostly devotes itself to the future Supreme Court justice’s first world-shaking sex discrimination case, 1972’s Moritz v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue: Ginsburg and her husband ... argued against a discriminatory statute before...

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  Searching for Ingmar Bergman Is a Cheery Toasting of a Most Somber Genius

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 24 at 6 a.m.

  ... The director of Rosenstrasse, Rosa Luxemburg and Sheer Madness is tracking Bergman, toasting him and his work with his collaborators and some high-profile fans

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  Aquaman

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 21 at 12 a.m.

  Wonder has often been in short supply in the never-ending age of superhero movies. But James Wan's giddy epic Aquaman has seven seas' worth of the simplest kind of it, razzle-dazzle imaginative variety. Here are the warriors of Atlantis...

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  Emily Blunt Rules, and Mary Poppins Returns Is Not at All Atrocious

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 19 at 6 a.m.

  True to the spirit of the chipper, somewhat aimless live-action Disney day killers that inspired it, Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns gets better the further it wanders from its actual story.

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  If Beale Street Could Talk

  Chuck Wilson | December 21 at 12 a.m.

  In his first film since the culture-shaking, Oscar-winning Moonlight, writer-director Barry Jenkins has not so much adapted James Baldwin's 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, as expanded it, in ways only the most accomplished...

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  Ben Is Back

  Alan Scherstuhl | December 21 at 12 a.m.

  For about three minutes at the start, Peter Hedges' age-of-opioids melodrama Ben Is Back offers a sight that has for too long been absent from our screens. Here's Julia Roberts beaming. Then, her movie star duties discharged, Roberts...