20th Century Women ★★★★ Opening Friday, Jan. 20 The slippery concept of family is at the heart of director Mike Mills’s loopy, lovely, and largely autobiographical new film, 20th Century Women, a story that aches with bittersweet memory. It’s 1979 in the Southern California enclave of Santa Barbara, and fifteen-year-old Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) is […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inFilm & Television
Animated Fable A Monster Calls Earns Some of Its Tears but Cruelly Squeezes Out Others
A MONSTER CALLS Opening Friday, Jan. 6 Since I became a parent, I’ve found that films that place kids in peril, or linger on their suffering, have a disproportionate effect on me. If the story is honest and artful, I’m a wreck and can barely see the screen through the blur of my tears. If […]
Posted inCulture
Movie Review: Rogue One, the New Star Wars, Is a Dazzling Space Drama
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ★★★★Opening Thursday, Dec. 15 As the first in a series of spinoff movies set in the Star Wars universe, Rogue One is an experiment of sorts. If it succeeds, you can expect to see a new Star Wars movie in theaters pretty much every year until the end of […]
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Movie Review: Office Christmas Party Is Raucous, Rude, Lampoon-Worthy Fun
Office Christmas Party ★★★ Now playing I’ve been to exactly one office Christmas party in my life. It was in San Francisco during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, when the Internet held infinite promise and banks were hosing down new media companies with cash. Everyone was young and restless, designer drugs were cheap […]
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Amy Adams’s Authenticity Elevates Tom Ford’s Glam Pulp Fiction in Nocturnal Animals
NOCTURNAL ANIMALS Opening Friday, Dec. 9 In the opening images of Nocturnal Animals, the new thriller written and directed by fashion mogul Tom Ford, obese naked women dance in slow motion, holding sparklers and looking directly into the camera. It’s a provocative way to open a movie. It also feels like the kind of empty […]
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Movie Review: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Is a Promising Start for a New Rowling Franchise
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them ★★★ ½Now playing I suspect that, for a while at least, it’s going to be difficult to avoid processing every halfway applicable film through the nightmare lens of the recent elections. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the latest installment in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter universe, opens […]
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In Gimme Danger, Jim Jarmusch Salutes His Buddy Iggy Pop’s Stooges Heyday
½Gimme Danger Thursday, Nov. 10, 9:15 p.m., The Rialto Has anyone on this planet aged as beautifully as Iggy Pop? Still rocking in the free world at the age of sixty-nine, Iggy continues to look impossibly good in his natural habitatonstage, shirtless, wielding the mic like a weapon. His deeply lined face is a road […]
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Twisty Erotic Thriller The Handmaiden is Fifty Shades of Cray
THE HANDMAIDEN Opening Friday, Nov. 4 The young, delicate Lady Hideko has never left the mansion she was raised in from childhood. Her Uncle Kouzuki is grooming her for marriageto himself, so he can plunder her inheritance. Until then, he keeps her in gilded captivity. Meanwhile, the teenage Sook-hee, an orphaned street urchin, runs with […]
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Movie Review: The Girl on the Train Is the Feel-Bad Movie of the Fall
The Girl on the Train ★★ ½ Opening Friday, Oct. 7, 2016 Rachel Watson is a mess. Two years after her husband left her (for the real estate agent!), she’s unemployed, deeply depressed, and drinking vodka out of thirty-two-ounce water bottles. Every day, she rides the commuter train into Manhattan, pretending to have a job. […]
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Deepwater Horizon Thrills but Leaves Important Questions Unanswered
Deepwater Horizon, the dramatic thriller based on the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe, could have gone wrong in a hundred different ways. By reducing events to a disaster movie templateThe Towering Inferno on waterthe filmmakers take a conspicuous risk. But in the hands of director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights), the movie never […]
