Listening to John Malkovich sing about holding his cowboy hat at the age of sixteen while his boyhood love drives away to chase her Hollywood dreams is a surreal pleasure, but it wouldn’t play as anything more than a curio without the genuine insight into pop entertainment and its attendant press organs that buttress director Mark Anthony Green’s seriously flawed but oddly compelling film. The influence of legendary songwriter The Dream, responsible for Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’, Beyonce...
2025-07-13 16:56:34 +0000 UTC
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The Phoenician Scheme is a lesser Wes Anderson almost from its first moments, in which flat line readings and hurried pacing grate against the cartoonish tone of an airplane crash sequence. Benicio del Toro makes the most of his relatively thin role as arms dealer and international facilitator Anatole “Zsa Zsa” Korda, but he can’t make unscrupulous roguishness work with the severely limited emotional palette available to him under Anderson’s direction. The result never rises ...
2025-07-11 21:22:01 +0000 UTC
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There’s no big twist in Bring Her Back. From about ten minutes in we understand what Laura’s trying to do. An attentive viewer might pick it up even earlier, during the cold open in which unnamed Russians perform obscure occult rituals on screaming, dead-eyed subjects in an abandoned warehouse. The film isn’t trying to get one over on its viewers, it’s trying to hold them face-down in its own metaphorical puddle, making them feel the moral enormity of what’s happening in fr...
2025-07-03 23:19:55 +0000 UTC
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“We will not waste a single drop of your precious urine,” simpers Eunuch Zhang (Yidi), patron of the arts and former courtier, to the pubescent Cheng Dieyi (Yin Zhi, with Ma Mingwei as his younger self and avant-garde stage and screen legend Leslie Cheung in the main adult role). It is perhaps the single most loathsome thing I’ve seen in film, this wrinkled, broken old man placing a glass teapot on the carpet and leering up at his young guest with a look of greedy anticipation, the crow...
2025-06-26 22:42:11 +0000 UTC
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Animated in a style intentionally evocative of both stop-motion and manhwa/manga, KPop Demon Hunters stands out immediately from the visually generic computer-animated fare churned out by Pixar and Dreamworks. The outsize, cartoonish emoting, the gorgeously fluid jerkiness of the visual style, it shows a real understanding of what works in animation. The script, alas, is not operating on the same level. The first hour is serviceable, delivering jokes at a steady clip and painting the...
2025-06-26 20:19:29 +0000 UTC
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As Jaime (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) and his twelve-year-old son, Spike (Alfie Williams) leave their island home on Spike’s first hunt, a stylized recitation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Boots Boots Boots’ by Taylor Holmes descends like a pall. Holmes’ voice is heavily distorted, evoking the quality of a school announcement or an emergency broadcast. His cadence is quick and relentless, perfectly capturing the regimented tramp of Kipling’s verse until it sounds like something sampled in ...
2025-06-20 20:04:52 +0000 UTC
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Sparse dialogue, a gorgeous hand-painted visual style, and a good, solid understanding of genre storytelling go a long way in the right hands. Predator: Killer of Killers may not break any new ground for sci-fi action, but its first two shorts demonstrate the restraint and attention to detail which made director Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey such an unexpected delight. Stoic samurai brothers who find themselves at odds with each other and with a slippery, snakelike Predator, a v...
2025-06-07 02:15:51 +0000 UTC
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We meet two deeply flawed but interesting people. We watch them struggle for some version of success on the largely brutal and mercenary Western frontier of post-Civil War America. They succumb to their flaws. That’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s gorgeous revisionist Western, in a nutshell, but that on its own is about as meaningful as knowing Rosebud is the name of the sled without having watched Citizen Kane. It has to be experienced. You have to m...
2025-05-25 17:15:35 +0000 UTC
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Oh wow, is war really loud? Is it confusing? Does it rob soldiers and civilians alike of their humanity? Should we have a party? Should we invite David Petraeus? Alex Garland’s Warfare certainly seems to think so. Interchangeable characters recite reams of jargon over the radio. They fire guns, mostly at nothing, sometimes at faceless Iraqi insurgents. They yell at each other. They go into and out of the building in which the vast majority of the film takes place. What do they feel...
2025-05-20 03:15:21 +0000 UTC
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Freedom is a pure idea. So said Nemik, the young Rebel soldier crushed to death in a tragic turn of fate during the long-ago heist on Aldhani. His words live on. A broken Major Partagaz listens to a recording of Nemik’s manifesto in the room where he spent his career trying to do every frantic, monstrous thing the young ideologue points out as the natural weaknesses of fascist oppression. “It just keeps spreading,” he says almost absently to Supervisor Lagret (Michael Jenn), who joins h...
2025-05-14 05:41:02 +0000 UTC
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The secret’s out. The party’s over. A handful of jumbled names — of planets, technicians — and a list of materials, the bare beginnings of a plan that will lead straight down a trail of bodies and desperate gambits to Luke Skywalker pumping a pair of proton torpedoes right into the Death Star’s guts. It comes to Cassian via Kleya, who sounds like she’s scraping the words out of herself with a melon baller, her expansive and indefatigable memory pushed to the breaking point by the ...
2025-05-14 03:39:35 +0000 UTC
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“Make it stop,” a young Luthen begs. He says it again and again, more a compulsive tic than a prayer. He shouts it in between swigs from his flask. People are dying outside the ship where he sits, gunned down by the dozen as he listens to their screams, to the rapid tattoo of blaster fire. But he’s not some lone survivor hiding from an ethnic cleanse, he’s the ranking non-commissioned officer in the death squad carrying it out. It’s only when he finds the young girl he’ll name Kle...
2025-05-14 02:30:06 +0000 UTC
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A Kaqchikel woman (Margarita Kenéfic) runs through a field of withering maize, one child on her hip, another clinging to her hand. Soldiers are coming. We can hear the tramp of their boots, the crass rumble of their voices. She tries to hide as her pursuers draw closer, fear twisting her regal features, the eyes of the children shining in the thin, pale bands of light that fall through the gaps in their shelter. But no, Carmen is only the aging wife of a senile former dictator, lying alone i...
2025-05-13 19:43:50 +0000 UTC
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Another year, another movie about the torturous cultural anxiety over fatness in which the only even remotely fat presence onscreen is a faceless body double. Like last year’s far superior The Substance, Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister has fatness on the brain but stops short of actually depicting it. Protagonist Elvira (Lea Myren) swallows a fantastical version of a tapeworm to slim down for Prince Julian’s (Isac Calmroth) ball without sacrificing her beloved ...
2025-05-13 03:23:24 +0000 UTC
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We open on a shot of the Imperial Senate Building reflected upside-down in the water of an ornamental pond. The lights of Coruscant glow softly above its sweeping dome. As Mon Mothma prepares to give a defiant anti-genocide speech for which she is almost certain to be arrested, tortured and killed and Cassian consigns himself to the impossible task of getting her out alive and spiriting her off-world to the Rebel base on Yavin, the building itself looms silent in the background. Architecture ...
2025-05-07 04:17:22 +0000 UTC
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Staring day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year at millions of people starving to death in real time, being shot and tortured and bombed, is enough to make you lose your mind. Everyone with a conscience understands this now, if they didn’t when the current savage escalation of Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestine began. We’ve been slowly going insane ever since the bombs began to fall, watching people beg for their lives and the lives of their childre...
2025-05-07 03:35:15 +0000 UTC
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“They have no shame, do they?” says Senator Oran (Raphael Roger Levy), discussing a staged terrorist attack on his home planet of Ghorman. “They don’t even bother to lie badly anymore.” It’s a sentiment every victim of social sadism and its hegemonic equivalent understands, to be subject to the power of gloating imbeciles who take pleasure in the obvious falsehood of their stories about your wickedness. They aren’t just ripping you limb from limb in public, they’re whimpering ...
2025-05-07 02:45:26 +0000 UTC
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It’s a miracle this show exists. That it’s one of the greatest seasons of television ever made is self-evident by the time its premiere wraps on a fight between vacant, dead-eyed cop Martin (Miles Teller) and a naked gangster in a mechanic’s garage. If you aren’t sold by then, perhaps James Urbaniak’s jaw-dropping turn as sexual predator and porn producer Stevie Crockett, a sort of business-forward Black Lodge entity, will cement its status. Or the staggering monologue by the dying ...
2025-05-05 20:45:30 +0000 UTC
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Hello gang! Beginning with tomorrow's screening of Anora, this month's entire slate of programming in the theater will be available to all $5 dollar subscribers in gratitude for all your support.
This link is a temporary invitation, meaning you can join the discord and watch movies, but if you navigate away from the server, you'll be booted and will have to come back in. It will stay up until the 31st!
2025-05-03 19:10:10 +0000 UTC
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Running a restaurant, as Artie Bucco tells us, is like owning an elephant. It costs a fortune, and sooner or later it shits on your head. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon weighs in firmly on the “sooner” side of things. Within ten minutes we’re watching an elephant take an explosive dump on a team of guys trying to shove it up a steep hillside road in the bed of a truck. This is how dreams are made in Hollywood! That broad, scatalogical tone drives the pounding rhythm of the film, soundtrack...
2025-05-01 01:12:10 +0000 UTC
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“You will carry her with you everywhere,” says Vel to the sniveling wannabe revolutionary who accidentally shot her lover, Cinta. “This is like skin now.” The message is clear. There’s no escaping our mistakes, no taking back the worst moments of our lives. Cinta is gone, killed for nothing by a stupid, feckless man who will take her ghost with him forever, who will — in the absolute best-case scenario — die trying and failing to make up for what he did in a moment of pointless ...
2025-04-30 06:00:28 +0000 UTC
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“I can’t believe you had me followed,” says Syril, his eyes alight with sick arousal as he locks eyes with his lover, ISB agent Dedra. It’s clear he’s weak in the knees at the knowledge that with a single order his girlfriend could have a blaster bolt placed dead-center in the back of his skull. Everyone has their own method of coping with the stress of imperial hegemony, I suppose. The alternatives are life in the camp of rebel hardliner Saw Gerrera, a pressure cooker of paranoid v...
2025-04-30 03:45:49 +0000 UTC
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The soft pastels and jewel tones of the Mothma estate, the tawny wheat fields, the deep greens and browns of the jungles of Yavin IV, that’s all in the past now. Ghorman is gray. The drab little Coruscant apartment where Cassian and Bix live between missions is gray. Gray offices. Gray streets. Gray little corner stores and gray arcades. It’s like something out of Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy adaptation, a symphony of whites and grays, tans and blacks. The shift c...
2025-04-30 02:45:49 +0000 UTC
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Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike) can’t see herself. Or, rather, she sees something, some shadow on the wall — perfect, vulnerable, desirable, beloved — but there is no stable self to cast that shadow. It’s a projection. A story she tells others, and one she can’t stop telling. She’s not a person, she’s just a compulsion with a face. In a Laura Palmer-esque scenario, the entirety of Gone Girl takes place around the structuring absence of her, even once she returns, first to the screen a...
2025-04-29 17:02:42 +0000 UTC
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Havoc isn’t great. The digital photography is often murky, the color palette is bland and played out, there’s nothing noteworthy happening on the acting front aside from a fun performance by Tom Hardy doing his signature mush-mouthed delivery, and the script is never better than fine. Even where it shines, in its action sequences, it often hews a little overstuffed, as in the dance club brawl between Triad gangsters and various factions of dirty cops. Director Gareth Evans’ overuse of w...
2025-04-26 23:59:30 +0000 UTC
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There isn’t much good horror about nursing homes. The subject is so taboo, especially among Americans, so freighted with guilt over the abandonment of aging and infirm parents to a hostile system, that we hardly talk about it outside of hushed confessions to our nearest and dearest. Working from a short story by author Owen Marshall, director James Ashcroft plunges headlong into the dehumanizing despair of institutional living, its similarities to imprisonment, and the class, disability, an...
2025-04-26 01:19:57 +0000 UTC
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“NIAMOS!” cry the guests at the Mothma-Sculdun wedding as they swirl and gyrate on the dance floor in the wake of the nuptial vows, their delicate scalloped gowns and flowing sleeves giving them the appearance of ornamental koi in motion. The thumping bass and one-word chorus, the name of the planet on which Cassian was arrested for walking around back in season one, makes it feel like some Chandrilan version of the Macarena. To drop a club banger into the middle of one of the tightest an...
2025-04-23 21:55:51 +0000 UTC
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Titled after the first two elements of a traditional Chandrilian wedding toast, ‘Sagrona Teema’ is as engrossing as it is beautiful, so preposterously better than anything else Disney has done with Star Wars it might as well be an entirely different medium, like one of the Jim Henson Workshop’s marvelous Skeksis in a world of those plastic monster finger puppets with the floppy little arms. Take for example Mon Mothma’s husband Perrin’s toast at his daughter’s wedding. Everything ...
2025-04-23 05:41:59 +0000 UTC
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“If I die tonight,” asks Imperial research technician Niya (Rachelle Diedericks), taking her first steps into the world of rebel action, “was it worth it?” Andor’s second season premiere leans hard on the dueling themes of the cost and method underpinning revolution, juxtaposing a rocky instance of grand theft starship and a traditional Chandrilan wedding slowly falling apart as well as the administrative woes of both the empire and its rebel foes. It’s a clever structure, contras...
2025-04-23 02:53:14 +0000 UTC
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“I miss my people,” says the vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell, more than reminiscent of the late, great Bill Paxton) to young Blues guitarist Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). “You can bring them back.” It’s not blood that Remmick wants, or at least not just blood, but music. Stories. A party that never ends with guests who never have to leave. “We had it all figured ‘til you killed Annie (Wunmi Mosaku),” the undead Elias “Stack” Moore (Michael B. Jordan) tells his twin, Elijah...
2025-04-22 02:24:02 +0000 UTC
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