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 […]
Glenn McDonald
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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 […]
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Movie Review: Renée Zellweger’s Rich Comic Character Deserves Better Than Bridget Jones’s Baby
Bridget Jones’s Baby ★★ ½ Opening Friday, Sept. 16 It’s easy to be cynical about a movie like Bridget Jones’s Baby, a sequel that was clearly assembled from the ground up as an entertainment industry product—a guaranteed payday for its stars and studio. This is a movie that’s already been made twice, and the third […]
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Movie Review: In The Light Between Oceans, It Turns Out They Do Make ‘Em Like They Used To
The Light Between Oceans ★★★★Opening Friday, Sept. 2, 2016 It’s a common lament among those who love old-fashioned Hollywood movies: They just don’t make ’em like they used to. Except sometimes they do. The period drama The Light Between Oceans is a throwback in all the best ways, with its epic themes, grand cinematography, and […]