Avengers: Age of Ultron★★★★Opening Friday Part of the fun of following movies—especially science-fiction movies—is seeing how they reflect our current cultural anxieties. Stories about artificial intelligence go way back, through Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey all the way to Metropolis. Recent entries such as Ex Machina and Her have updated the genre with […]
Glenn McDonald
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The Queue: Comics talk shop in Kevin Pollak’s Misery Loves Comedy
What is it that’s so compelling about listening to comedians talk about comedy? I’m not sure I know, but I’m hooked. I’ve been listening to Marc Maron’s WTF podcast religiously for years, and have recently been working my way though the archives of Jerry Seinfeld’s high-rent riff on the premise, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. […]
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Documentary Lambert & Stamp tells The Who’s story by way of two backstage Svengalis
LAMBERT & STAMP Opening Friday A case can be made that, of the three big British Invasion bands, The Who were the most interesting because they were the most fucked up. The Beatles were cute and the Stones were sexy, but The Who were a gang of working-class street kids from England’s violent Mod scene. […]
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New documentary Merchants of Doubt exposes the art of spin
MERCHANTS OF DOUBT Opening Friday I’ve come to accept that pretty much everyone on television is lying to me. The advertisers, of course. Certainly the “reality” shows. And a good percentage of network news. The depressing extent of the dilemma is exposed in Merchants of Doubt. Based on the 2010 book by Naomi Oreskes and […]
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The Queue: Can’t make Full Frame? Check out these five great docs on Netflix
If you’re heading out to this weekend’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, be sure to check out the INDY‘s alarmingly large preview. But if you can’t make it to the fest, you can still see some great documentaries from your couch via Netflix’s streaming service, a great place to find both well-known and […]
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Movie review: Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem is really a trial of Israel’s rabbinical courts
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem★★★★ Now playing Under contemporary Israeli law, both marriage and divorce are controlled by rabbinical courts. There is no tradition of civil law when it comes to getting hitched or unhitched. A woman can only be divorced if she is officially presented with a religious document—called a “gett,” or “get”—by […]
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The Queue: Netflix has a winner with sweet, kooky Tina Fey creation Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Fans of NBC’s late, great 30 Rock will want to check out the new Netflix series from Tina Fey and her creative partner, Robert Carlock. Like the earlier series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a style of joke-writing that’s fast, loose and literate. It’s the kind of series you can simply enjoy on one level, and […]
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Live-action Cinderella goes for old-fashioned Disney magic rather than revisionist flash
CINDERELLA Now playing Remember those old-fashioned hardcover fairytale books your grandma used to buy for your birthday, with the ornamental lettering and baroque illustrations? The ones you buried in your closet while you read Goosebumps and Mad Magazine? Disney’s new live-action update of CINDERELLA is the movie equivalent of those proper old tomes. Directed by […]
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Movie review: An effective take on the consequences of life after death in The Lazarus Effect
The Lazarus Effect ★★★ 1/2Now playing The field of resuscitation medicine is a busy area of science these days. Researchers are exploring the relatively new idea that death is more of a process than an event, and that patients can potentially be brought back to life hours after vital organs stop functioning. That’s the jumping-off […]
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The Queue: Jake Gyllenhaal gets his sociopath on in creepy thriller Nightcrawler
Nighttime in Los Angeles is a busy and sinister place in Nightcrawler, an unsettling thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal as a freelance TV news cameraman. Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, part of a ghoulish, nocturnal mutation of paparazzi—nightcrawlers—who follow cops and first responders to crime scenes and accidents. The movie makes many depressing observations about the media, […]