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 […]
Glenn McDonald
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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, […]
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Movie Review: The Conjuring 2 Checks Off Every Horror Movie Trope of the Last Fifty Years
The Conjuring 2★★★ Opening Friday, June 10, 2016 Supernatural thriller The Conjuring 2 doesn’t have an original idea in its scary little head. It borrows most of its plot and imagery from other horror movies, rearranges them, and then spits them back out in a gob of blood and teeth. But if you’ve been paying […]
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Movie Review: Go See Alice Through the Looking Glass For the Visual Design or Not at All
Alice Through the Looking Glass★★★ ½ Opening Friday, May 27, 2016 Disney has been in the spectacle business for more than eighty years now, and its fantasy movies, both live action and animation, tend toward visual extravaganzas, especially in the modern summer blockbuster season. In this regard, Alice Through the Looking Glass does not disappoint. […]
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Movie Review: TV’s Key & Peele Make Unlikely Hollywood Bid With Cat-Meme-Slash-Action-Comedy Keanu
Keanu ★★ Opening Friday, April 29Keanu—the feature-film debut of TV comedy team Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele—is surely the biggest disappointment at the movies so far this year. It’s one thing to see a bad movie. It’s another thing when you’re fully expecting a good one. For five seasons on Comedy Central, Key & Peele […]