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. And so it […]
Glenn McDonald
Posted inCulture
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. 2. Wow, this is dark. 3. Wow, this is fucking amazing. I kept the f-bomb in my internal monologue—I was watching with the kids—but the rest I literally said out […]
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Movie review: Chris Hemsworth is hard to swallow as a computer genius in Blackhat
Blackhat ★★ Now playing With surveillance concerns, security breaches and foreign hacker attacks tumbling though the news cycle pretty much constantly these days, it would seem that Michael Mann’s new thriller, Blackhat, is well-timed to reflect our cultural anxieties. And it would be, I suppose, if the movie were really about hackers. But despite the […]
Posted inFilm & Television
Unbroken should be required viewing for anyone who thinks torture is justified
UNBROKEN Opening Dec. 25 UNBROKEN, director Angelina Jolie’s adaptation of Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling nonfiction chronicle, tells the true story of Olympic athlete Louie Zamperini, who endured an incredible series of traumas during World War II. After surviving for 47 days adrift on a raft in the Pacific, Zamperini suffered for two-and-a-half years in a brutal […]
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Into the Woods puts stage magic on the screen—but not always seamlessly
INTO THE WOODS Opening Dec. 25 Sometimes, if you shift gears, you can turn a perplexing movie into a pleasurable one. This is the case with INTO THE WOODS, Disney’s much-hyped adaptation of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical, which happens to have recently finished a run at Playmakers. If you enter these woods looking for […]
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Tim Burton directs the incredible true story of a kitsch-art con man in Big Eyes
BIG EYES Opening Dec. 25 By all indications, the actor Christoph Waltz is a perfectly nice guy in real life. On screen, however, he projects a creepy menace that resonates on some ambient frequency. That makes him wrong for the lead role in BIG EYES, director Tim Burton’s otherwise engaging film based on the real-life […]
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Movie review: Wild is like Eat Pray Love with more sex and drugs
WILD Opening Friday Here is Cheryl Strayed’s plan as she sets out to walk the 2,600 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail over the course of three months: “I’m going to walk myself back to the woman my mother thought I was. I’m going to put myself in the way of beauty.” The actual and […]
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Movie review: Hunger Games turns dark in the series’ latest installment
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1★★★½ Glenn McDonald With The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1, Hollywood’s reigning teenage-wasteland franchise brings the darkness, spiraling the story into some new, interesting and heavy territory. It’s a war picture, basically, with Jennifer Lawrence’s reluctant heroine Katniss Everdeen assuming the mantle of armed resistance leader. In the troubled empire of Panem, […]
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Movie review: Patriot or traitor, Edward Snowden is human in Citizenfour
Citizenfour★★★★½ Now playing A well-designed two-hour documentary may be our single most efficient format for telling a complex story in a manageable amount of time. When assembled by a skillful filmmaker, the images, sounds and textual elements don’t just add up to more than their sum—they become exponential, delivering a kind of fractal storytelling experience. […]