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. […]
Glenn McDonald
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A drum prodigy and a sadistic mentor in Whiplash
WHIPLASH Opening Friday Is the chance to achieve artistic genius worth any price? That’s the question at the heart of Whiplash, a bold and bracing indie drama featuring one of the year’s best performances. It belongs to veteran character actor J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher, a renowned jazz instructor at an elite music conservatory. Fletcher […]
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Movie review: Black holes and bombast overcome most of Interstellar’s plot holes
Interstellar ★★★ Now playing Director Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated sci-fi epic Interstellar is a movie whose reach exceeds its grasp by several light years. The film evokes grand questions of cosmic significance in its first half, then abandons them to goofball blockbuster conventions in the second, trusting that viewers won’t notice or care—so long as […]
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Movie review: Laggies is a rom-com about the essential tyranny of adulthood
LAGGIES Opening Friday Amovie about the essential tyranny of adulthood, LAGGIES stars Keira Knightly as Megan, a flighty and overeducated 20-something still hanging around her hometown of suburban Seattle. “Flighty” is the operative term: Seeing the world of marriage and career approaching, Meg runs like hell the other way. With friends like hers, the strategy […]
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Film review: In smart, wicked indie Listen Up Philip, language is a weapon
LISTEN UP PHILIP Opening Friday Listen Up Philip is a film that plays like a book, which is usually not a good thing. Books and movies have different durations and rhythms, and it’s tricky to beat-match them properly. But in the hands of talented young writer-director Alex Ross Perry, this smart, wicked indie succeeds as […]
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Halloween special: Bonus Materials picks view-on-demand films for a scary movie night at home
Watching scary movies at home is a time-honored Halloween tradition, but needing to plan ahead at Blockbuster is a thing of the past. Now, if you’re a Netflix subscriber, hundreds of horror movies are instantly available online. Here are 10 recommendations for streaming Halloween chills, focusing on relatively under-the-radar selections that are worth digging up […]
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Go ghost hunting with Haunted NC
In 7th grade, it was my entirely serious and somber intention to become a parapsychologista scientific investigator of paranormal phenomena. I was heavily influenced by a series of Time/Life books, “Mysteries of the Unknown,” that was relentlessly advertised on television. Children of the 1980s may remember this. For the low, low price of $19.99 per […]
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Film review: Children experience the ancillary horrors of WWII in The Notebook
THE NOTEBOOK 1/2Opening Friday Twin 13-year-old boys endure the ancillary horrors of war in THE NOTEBOOK, a relentlessly grim WWII drama by Hungarian filmmaker János Szász. Shortlisted for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2014 Academy Awards, it’s an admirable piece of craftsmanship if you’ve got the stomach for it. Anyone expecting a remake of […]
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An offensive bourgeois quest for meaning in Hector and the Search for Happiness
HECTOR AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS Opening Friday Hector is curiously unhappy. A well-off London psychiatrist, he seems to have all the necessary components of happinessan adoring girlfriend, a job he likesand yet he can’t seem to turn the corner into contentment. So Hector sets off on a globe-trotting journey to find himself, resulting in […]
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Bonus Materials: David Lynch, nightmare membranes and Eraserhead
Thirty-seven years after its initial theatrical release, David Lynch’s debut feature film Eraserhead has been reissued and upgraded to U.S. Blu-ray format in a gorgeous package from the stalwart archivists at the Criterion Collection. The reissue includes a full 4K digital restoration, six additional short films and the usual generous assortment of new and archival […]