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. […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inFilm & Television
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 […]
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Movie Review: Don’t Think Twice Gets Inside the Worlds of Improv Comedy and Saturday Night … Er, Weekend Live
Don’t Think Twice ★★★ Now playing One of today’s most distinctive comic voices, Mike Birbiglia has a meandering storytelling style that occupies a very specific coordinate in the Venn diagram of funny business, somewhere among the intersections of stand-up comedy, DIY theater, and confessional monologue. When Birbiglia brought his one-man show, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, to […]
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Financial Tension Between Parents Strains a Friendship Between Boys in Indie Gem Little Men
LITTLE MEN Opening Friday, September 9 The German historical drama The Lives of Others won the Academy Award for best foreign language film in 2006, and deservedly so. But Little Men, the new indie gem from director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange), is more deserving of the 2006 film’s title. In its most essential mode, […]
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Movie Review: Like Bond, Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne Is Less a Character Than a Genre
Jason Bourne★★★ Now playing Poor Jason Bourne—that guy just can’t catch a break. As an amnesiac super-spy, he’s forever being shot at by people he doesn’t know, for reasons he can’t remember. Relentlessly hunted by every intelligence agency in the world, he must remain radically off-grid in places like Uzbekistan, Nepal, and Cleveland. When old […]
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Movie Review: Shut Up, Misogynists, the Ghostbusters Reboot Has a Great Cast. The Rest of the Film, Unfortunately …
Ghostbusters ★★ Opening Friday, July 15, 2016 Contrary to all the sexist noise online, remaking Ghostbusters with a female cast was not a bad idea. Of course not—with director Paul Feig behind the camera and Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy in front of it, it was an empirically good idea. Unfortunately, the result of that […]
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Movie Review: The Secret Life of Pets Riffs on Our Animal Obsession
The Secret Life of Pets★★★ ½ stars Opening Friday, July 8, 2016 From the creative team that brought you Despicable Me and those rascally Minions, The Secret Life of Pets is an exquisitely calibrated family movie with plenty of laughs for both grown-ups and kids. The concept is simple: What do our pets actually do […]
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Spielberg Does Roald Dahl in The BFG—But Where’s the Storytelling Magic?
THE BFG Opening Friday, July 1 Turns out the “F” in The BFG doesn’t stand for what I thought it stood for, and it’s not the latest Judd Apatow comedy. It’s actually a family film from Steven Spielberg, based on the story by famed children’s author Roald Dahl. You can imagine my surprise. In fact, […]
