Everest ★★★Opening Friday There are movies you want to see on the big screen if you’re going to see them at all. Big spectacle movies just don’t scale down that well to the screens and speakers of your living-room TV, computer screen or—god help us—mobile device. Everest is just that kind of movie. Based on […]
Glenn McDonald
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Movie review: I see old people! M. Night Shyamalan does the twist in The Visit
The Visit★★★ Now playing Fairly or not, when you go into an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you expect a twist. The director made his bones in Hollywood with 1999’s The Sixth Sense, which features one of the most cleverly obscured script flips in the history of scary movies. Shyamalan’s plot-twist movies since then have usually […]
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Movie review: A surprisingly slapdash adaptation of Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods
A Walk in the Woods★ ½ Now playing Travel writer Bill Bryson is bored. Semi-retired in a stately New England homestead, he longs for one more grand adventure. Bryson (Robert Redford) stumbles upon his chance when he takes a stroll and discovers that the Appalachian Trail runs right through his neighborhood. Inspired, he decides to […]
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Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig vent Millennial anxieties in Mistress America
MISTRESS AMERICA Opening Friday The latest collaboration between director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig is a fast and funny indie comedy with a heart of looming darkness. Mistress America is packed with charming, narcissistic people doing reckless, selfish things in the name of self-actualization and creativity.
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Movie review: Not even a shockingly ripped Donnie Darko can punch up Southpaw’s soapy script
Southpaw★★ ½ Now playing Costarring Jake Gyllenhaal and his torso, Southpaw is a technically competent but largely uninteresting boxing movie with the soapiest script this side of the daytime Emmys. The movie’s main appeal is watching Gyllenhaal muscle his way through it with a powerful physical performance. Directed by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), Southpaw chronicles […]
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Movie review: Amy Schumer’s brilliant sketch comedy goes off the rails in Trainwreck
Trainwreck ★★Now playing Trainwreck, the much-anticipated collaboration between director Judd Apatow and writer/star Amy Schumer, is a new twist on an old scam. It’s a bait-and-switch in which the viewer is promised one kind of film in the marketing blitz and then finds an inferior product in the theater. Schumer plays a version of her […]
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Movie review: Amy is an exceptional documentary you might not want to see
Amy ★★★ Now playing In her short career, Amy Winehouse stunned the music world as a genius-level jazz vocalist and natural-born songwriter. She was an artist of massive wattage—a feisty North Londoner with a smart mouth and a fragile heart. In the devastating documentary Amy, director Asif Kapadia tells the story of Winehouse’s tilt-a-whirl life […]
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Sundance darling Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a mischievously meta teen-cancer comedy
ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL Now playing Authenticity is a slippery substanceat the movies, anyway. You can’t manufacture it. It emerges from the process of filmmaking, somewhere in that unknowable alchemy of collaborative art.
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Jurassic World and Inside Out show that digital wizardy can’t shine without smarts and heart
JURASSIC WORLD Now playingINSIDE OUT Opening Friday
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Movie review: Layers of metafiction can’t conceal Gemma Bovery’s lightweight core
Gemma Bovery★★ ½ Now playing Martin Joubert is profoundly bored. A humble baker in a small Normandy town, he has little to occupy his days. His wife doesn’t like him much and his teenage son has disappeared into hoodies and headphones. Each day, Martin’s work is done by dawn. All he has is his books. […]
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