ELLE ½ Opening Friday, Jan. 13 A powerful video game company CEO is raped by a masked man, then does everything she can to identify the rapistexcept call the police. In Paul Verhoeven’s Elle, the elaborate plot underlying this attention-grabbing premise is revealed step by step, focusing on Michèle’s (Isabelle Huppert) increasingly drastic deviations from […]
Ryan Vu
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Movie Review: An Indie Short With a Clever Premise Becomes a Surprisingly Effective Horror Film in Lights Out
Lights Out ★★★ ½ Opening Friday, July 22, 2016 The story behind Lights Out, the surprisingly effective first feature film by David F. Sandberg, is the stuff of indie auteur fantasy. After Sandberg put a no-budget short starring his wife, Lotta Losten, on YouTube, it went viral, attracting the attention of horror maven James Wan […]
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The Lobster Surreally Skewers Society’s Fear of Single People
THE LOBSTER Opening Friday, June 3 Few films are as disturbing or funny as writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos‘s latest. That it manages to be both at once is an even rarer feat. As the leading light of what some critics call a “weird wave” of Greek cinema, Lanthimos is benefiting from international financing and Hollywood stars […]
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Movie Review: Bloody Action and Bloodless Politics in Punks-Versus-Skins Horror Thriller Green Room
Green Room ★★★ Opening Friday, April 29 With Green Room, writer/director Jeremy Saulnier solidifies his burgeoning reputation as an action auteur capable of making brutally effective thrillers on a modest budget. Those looking for exploitation-style thrills and chills won’t be disappointed, but those intrigued by the subcultural conflict between punks and Neo-Nazis may be left […]
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Movie Review: The Witch Conjures the Demon-Haunted World of English Settlers From Real Accounts
The Witch ★★★ ½ Now playing For seventeenth-century English Puritan Joseph Glanvill, belief in the supernatural was a prerequisite for belief in God. Folktales about ghosts, witches, and devils weren’t just children’s pastimes, but a vital part of the historical record. The stories Glanvill collected captured readers’ imaginations long after skepticism became the norm for […]
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Movie Review: A Delightful Satire of Postwar Hollywood in Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar!★★★★ Now playing If Hail, Caesar! is the Coen brothers’s Contempt—Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 mock epic about the making of a historical blockbuster in postwar Hollywood—then it’s an homage that inverts Godard’s satirical aims. Caesar’s moral center doesn’t belong to a lone writer or director struggling against the corrupt studio systems, but to producer and […]
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Movie review: Charlie Kaufman returns with Anomalisa, a singular stop-motion fable about consumer capitalism and the male ego
Anomalisa★★★Now playing In the opening shot of Anomalisa, Charlie Kaufman’s return to film after 2008’s divisive Synecdoche, New York, an airliner is framed against a majestic sunset. A cacophony of voices—passenger chatter, a flight attendant’s recited instructions—surrounds us as the camera slowly pulls back to reveal our vantage point as that of neither god nor […]
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Room is a harrowing tale of captivity, escape and the dark heart of familial love
ROOM Opening Friday Emma Donoghue and Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, adapted from Donoghue’s acclaimed novel, is a cathartic exploration of the trauma at the heart of the love between mother and child. The horrific premisethat young mother Joy Newsome (Brie Larson) and her son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), are prisoners in a psychopath’s shedis kept in the […]
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Movie review: Ripped-from-the-headlines drone warfare in Good Kill
Good Kill★★ ½ Opening Friday Writer/director Andrew Niccol’s biggest achievement in Good Kill is finding a way to make drone warfare genuinely thrilling. It’s too bad that the Gattaca and Lord of War director’s storytelling fails to reach the same heights. Drone pilot Major Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) dreams of the days when he used […]
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What Google Earth doesn’t show you
Follow the underlined links to find the maps Look up any conventional map of Boylan Heights, a neighborhood in Raleigh, and you’ll find a more or less organized system of streets, a few icons indicating parks and parking lots, and a whole lot of empty space in between. Look at one of artist and educator […]