As town names go, Knockemstiff is something of a knockout. It’s evocative, to be sure: a pulpy heartland-gothic handle as evocative as the wizened and instantly recognizable face of an aged character actor. It’s a place that immediately sounds like it has a preacher you can’t trust, a sheriff with …
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You might expect director Rod Lurie (West Point class of 1984 with four years in military service) to push the flag-waving aspect of a film about the war in Afghanistan. Though The Outpost pays heartfelt tribute to the soldiers who fought and died during the bloody 2009 Battle of Kamdesh, …
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Seeing French divinities Catherine Deneuve and Juliette Binoche together is enough to make this movie a must-see — and that’s no lie. Any flimsiness in the script by director Hirokazu Kore-eda, the Japanese filmmaker behind Shoplifters, After Life, and Nobody Knows, is quickly overcome by the sight of this dazzling …
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A riff on The Most Dangerous Game‘s well-worn premise, the Blumhouse blockbuster-to-be The Hunt was supposed to be just another project coming off a prolific production company’s assembly line, a tweaked take on class warfare that was part tongue-in-cheek transgressiveness and part tongue-ripped-from-mouth shock treatment. Then word got out that …
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Robert Downey, Jr. talks to the animals in Dolittle, an object lesson in cinematic incoherence that would be easy to dismiss as a hot mess if it could even raise a temperature. Instead, this out-and-out disaster dissolves in a puddle of botched intentions that will leave children sad and confused …
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For seven seasons, The Good Wife was a cable drama dressed in broadcast procedural’s clothing. Each episode introduced one or more legal cases that would be resolved within the course of that hour, the better to be eaten by a weary audience at the end of a long (and often …
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The stories are legion, and they are remarkably similar. Some begin in a Buffalo, New York, concert hall in 1978; others in a five-star hotel in Venice in 1998. But it usually starts with a seemingly benign offer of help, or a friendly chat, or a meeting about the next …
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For some people, Bruce Springsteen doesn’t just write lyrics — he sings words to live by. That’s the case for Javed (dynamite newcomer Viveik Kalra), a no-hope British-Pakistani teen feeling the financial squeeze of Thatcherism in 1987 Luton. Then he hears Springsteen for the first time, and the words of …
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BH90210 is a reunion of Beverly Hills 90210 in which most of the original stars of Beverly Hills 90210 play themselves as they try to mount… a reunion of Beverly Hills 90210. It would probably not make a list of the five weirdest TV revivals of all time, in part …
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In the middle of a summer of dumb fun and comic-book escapism, it’s some kind of miracle to find a film as seriously ambitious, scrappy and suspenseful as Luce. A provocation about race, privilege and the expectations that come with both, the movie follows the title character, played by star-in-the-making …
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