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.
Glenn McDonald
Posted inCulture
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 […]
Posted inFilm & Television
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.
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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, […]
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The Queue: Binge-watch on the dark side with astonishing tech-horror series Black Mirror
When more than one person suggests that I get on board with a particular Netflix binge-watching opportunity, I try to pay attention and put it in the queue. Alan Partridge, say, or Patton Oswalt’s new special. When a dozen different people insist I watch something immediately—well, that’s when the magic usually happens.
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Movie review: The found-footage genre, teen romance and time travel collide in Project Almanac
Project Almanac★★ ½ Now playing I’m a sucker for good time-travel stories, in films and in books. Something about temporal paradoxes makes my brain itch in a totally pleasant way. So when a promising but ultimately underwhelming time-travel movie like Project Almanac comes along, I figure—eh, you take what you can get. From the studio […]
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The Queue: Class conflict and Victorian grotesques—you know, for the kids—in The Boxtrolls
Watching the stop-motion animated film THE BOXTROLLS at home over the weekend, I went through three distinct phases of reaction: 1. Wow, this is different.
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