Opening Wednesday, Nov. 22 In its prime, Pixar was impossibly reliable, churning out original family films jammed with creativity, wit, and sophisticated emotional intelligence. Think Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, or WALL-E. We didn’t know how good we had it. Now Pixar is a subsidiary of omnivorous Disney, and its last two films (Finding […]
Glenn McDonald
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Movie Review: Goodbye Christopher Robin Is Too Squishy to Bear
Goodbye Christopher Robin ★★ Now playing There’s a certain kind of overproduced classic rock sound that makes me lunge for the car radio dial whenever it rolls around. The 1970s band Boston is an infamous example of this production style, which polishes every sonic texture to a smooth and unnatural sheen. When I hear a […]
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Movie Review: The Paintings of van Gogh Come to Dazzling Life in Loving Vincent
Loving Vincent ★★★½ Now playing The historical drama Loving Vincent, concerning the life and death of Vincent van Gogh, is being billed as the world’s first fully painted feature film. Indeed, each of the 65,000 frames in this movie was hand-painted by a small army of artists over the course of seven years, with the […]
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Ex Libris Gave Us One Simple Idea: Put the Librarians in Charge of the Country
EX LIBRIS:THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY Opening Friday, Oct. 6 Frederick Wiseman is an elder statesman of documentary filmmaking whose long-form works require a certain commitment from the viewer. His latest, a three-and-a-half-hour exploration of the New York Public Library system, might seem like a daunting proposition for a night at the moviesand it is. […]
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Movie Review: It Is Plenty Scary, But It Also Has Heart
It ★★★★ Now playing Theodicy is a theological term that refers to the problem of evil as an active force in the world. More specifically, it’s an attempt to resolve the dilemma in many Western religions of how evil can exist in a universe supposedly created and governed by an all-powerful and benevolent God. It’s […]
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Movie Review: Though Brightened by Its Lead Actor, Patti Cake$ Is a Sub-8 Mile Hip-Hop Contrivance
Patti Cake$ ★½ Now playing As Chuck D sagely warned us, so many years ago: Don’t believe the hype. Patti Cake$, the hip-hop drama that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, is getting a lot of frankly baffling hype as it rolls into theaters for a late-summer release. Fox Searchlight Pictures, the […]
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Crime Catastrophe Good Time Is a High-Voltage Power Play that Leaves a Neon Ache Behind Your Eyes
GOOD TIME Opening Friday, August 25 Ever have one of those late-night moments, after too many drinks and alkaloid derivatives, when you wind up in a truly bizarre situation and ask yourself, What impossible sequence of poor choices did I make to arrive at this specific place and time? For would-be bank robber Connie (Robert […]
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Movie Review: Scary Nuns, Creepy Dolls, and Not a Few Plot Holes in The Conjuring Franchise’s Latest Spawn, Annabelle: Creation
Annabelle: Creation ★★★½ Now playing On a recent library whim, I picked up an anthology of contemporary horror stories—nominees for the annual Bram Stoker Award for short fiction, I think it was. It was a very nice surprise, actually. Fans of the genre will be happy to hear that innovative and sophisticated horror is alive […]
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Obvious Child’s Gillian Robespierre and Jenny Slate Reunite for Landline, an Ode to Nineties Anxiety and Optimism
LANDLINE Opening Friday, August 4 Younger readers might not be aware of this, but the nineties were awesome. A Clinton in the White House, a budget surplus, no wars, no smartphones, and the best music since the sixties. This isn’t an opinion, I’m afraid. It’s a fact. The nineties were the best. Set in the […]
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H.P. Lovecraft Meets Art House Cinema in the Odd, Ominous A Ghost Story
A GHOST STORY Opening Friday, July 28 “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” That’s H.P. Lovecraft, inventor of the modern horror story, who had a debilitating preoccupation with the essential cosmic terror of existence in an unknowable universe. “We live […]