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 […]
Glenn McDonald
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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 […]
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Don Cheadle’s Miles Davis Film, Miles Ahead, Isn’t a Real Biopic—It’s Something Better
MILES AHEAD Opening Friday, April 22 When he’s locked in, Don Cheadle has more raw wattage than any other screen actor I can think of. He broke into the business in 1995 via the criminally underrated Denzel Washington noir Devil in a Blue Dress with an audition tape that has become Hollywood legend. (Google it.) […]
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Richard Linklater’s Joyous Everybody Wants Some!! Brims with Baseball, Sex, and Eighties Nostalgia
EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! Opening Friday, April 22 Nature has wisely arranged things so that we live through our youth while we’re young. With the energy we expend in our teens and twenties, and the changes we must navigate, we’d never survive otherwise. Richard Linklater’s new comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!, captures this sentiment. Set in the […]
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Movie Review: City of Gold Deliciously Translates a Celebrated Food Critic’s Style to the Screen
City of Gold ★★★ ½ Now playing For dedicated foodies, City of Gold is the best dinner-and-a-movie option to hit local theaters since Jon Favreau’s underrated Chef. This sprightly new documentary profiles the life and work of Los Angeles Times writer Jonathan Gold, the first food critic to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Gold made […]
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Movie Review: The Divergent Series: Allegiant Diverges From the Franchise’s Intriguing Sci-Fi Sociology
The Divergent Series: Allegiant★★ Opening Friday, March 18 I have a suspicion that our future overlords (probably robotic) will look back at the first years of the twenty-first century and wonder: What was up with all the teenage wasteland movies? The Divergent Series: Allegiant is the latest installment in an increasingly weary genre, one in […]
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Film Review: Indie Sci-Fi Film Creative Control Probes the Darkness Simmering Under Virtual Reality
CREATIVE CONTROL Opening Friday Ever get the feeling that something truly sinister is simmering quietly beneath our brave new world of digital technology? The dark sci-fi drama Creative Control thinks so, too. Director Benjamin Dickinson’s squirmy black-and-white indie is a cautionary tale set five minutes in the future, concerning a virtual reality technology called Augmenta. […]
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Movie Review: Deadpool Is Spider-Man But With Nudity, Gore and No Fourth Wall
Deadpool ★★ ½ Now playing With the irreverent action comedy Deadpool, Marvel Entertainment jumps headfirst into the hard-R end of the comic-book movie spectrum. The results are mixed. The good news is that the film is better than the trailers suggest—largely because the best jokes are far too filthy to put in general-audience previews. The […]
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Movie review: Real-life maritime rescue story The Finest Hours is Disneyfied disaster porn
The Finest Hours★★★ Now playing On February 18, 1952, a massive nor’easter crashed upon the New England coastline with colossal waves and gale-force winds. The storm was so powerful that not one but two massive oil tankers split in half off the coast of Cape Cod. With four separate floating husks in the water—and four […]
