LEAN ON PETE Opening Friday, May 4 Writer-director Andrew Haigh is back with Lean on Pete, an adaptation of Willy Vlautin’s novel of the same name. After devastating deep dives into a brief connection between two queer twentysomethings in Weekend (2011) and the waning love of a long marriage in 45 Years (2015), Haigh delicately […]
Luke Hicks
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Full Frame: Fred Rogers, Who Benevolently Raised Generations of Children on Public Television, Gets His Due in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?★★★★½ Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, DurhamWon’t You Be My Neighbor?, the story of the nationally beloved TV icon known as Mr. Rogers, captures the incredibly genuine nature of the late Fred Rogers. This man was not making a television show to strike it rich, wield power, prove someone right or […]
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Full Frame: Talal Derki Daringly Infiltrates a Jihadist Community in Of Fathers and Sons
Of Fathers and Sons★★★★ Friday, April 6 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Durham Have you ever glimpsed life inside a radical Islamic caliphate? If you’re reading this, you probably haven’t. Anyone who has is most likely still living inside it, not sharing its story with the world. Though they are an extreme minority to the […]
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The Top Ten Films (Plus Four Critics’ Picks) of 2017
1. GOOD TIME Raw, rambunctious, and funny, Good Time redeems American cinema from the doldrums of pre-packaged comic-book franchises and inert middle-class dramas. Connie Nikas (Robert Pattinson) traverses New York’s five boroughs, stealing and jumping fences, to rescue his mentally ill brother from a state-run facility. Dramatizing Connie’s odyssey with desperate dark humor, Ben and […]
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Fall into Films
You’re either already pumped about Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Blade Runner 2049, Thor: Ragnarok, and Justice League or you’ve read your fill about themmaybe both. Here are twelve fab fall films less liable to inspire déjà vu. (Remember: the smaller the distributor, the slipperier the release date; IMDB’s “Showtimes & Tickets” feature is a […]
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In a Way, Detroit Rounds Out a Thematic Trilogy of War Films by Kathryn Bigelow
DETROIT Opening Friday, August 4 Detroit is not for the faint of heart. Kathryn Bigelow throws us directly into the 1967 Detroit riots to fend for ourselves amid a sickening onslaught of racially motivated violence and hatred. It’s genuinely hard to watch. But the portrayal of law enforcement’s gross, inhumane treatment of black people, which […]
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The Big Sick Is a New Kind of Rom-Com for a New Kind of America
THE BIG SICK Opening Friday, July 7 There’s nothing overly convenient about husband-and-wife screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s feature debut: no rom-com cheese, no onslaught of genre tropes, no cause for eye-rolling whatsoever. Instead, it truthfully portrays the shifting cultural and romantic landscape of the U.S. Director Michael Showalter, a career screenwriter himself, […]
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Afterimage, the Under-Seen Final Work by Great Polish Filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, Comes to the Cary Theater
AFTERIMAGE Thursday, June 8 2 & 7 p.m., $3–$5 The Cary Theater, Cary As the final work of renowned Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, who died last October, Afterimage has a deathly tone that’s doubly apt. It chronicles the slow, gray erasure of Polish avant-garde painter Wladyslaw Strzeminski, played by Boguslaw Linda. We follow the one-armed, […]
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Movie Review: Animated Fable The Red Turtle Uses No Words, and No Words Do It Justice
The Red Turtle★★★★½ Now playing Dutch writer-director Michael Dudok de Wit’s first animated feature is quiet, mysterious, and breathtaking. It is almost entirely void of vocal language, other than the occasional emotive grunt. It complements silence with the audible twisting and turning of the tropics—leaves whistling in the wind, ocean waves washing onto the sand, […]
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Movie Review: Shirley MacLaine Is Great in The Last Word. Too Bad It’s a Terrible Picture.
The Last Word★ ½ Now playing The reality The Last Word proposes is a thinly disguised fantasy. Its world is one where a cranky octogenarian can burst through the doors of a radio station and start up a conversation with a regionally popular host and it all goes smoothly—where any ol’ tow truck driver is […]