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4/5
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Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Rian Johnson’s third outing with droll detective Benoit Blanc, perhaps the most memorable original new movie character in decades, is a grimly funny gothic romp through modern hot-button Americana.
Posted Nov 26, 2025
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4.5/5
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Bugonia
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Grimly hilarious, this mashup of black comedy, social commentary, suspense, and horror is sharp and stinging, with a haunting gut punch of a finale... and it’s Yorgos Lanthimos’s most accessible film yet.
Posted Oct 24, 2025
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4.5/5
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Good Boy
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A haunted house movie from the dog’s perspective. No cheap gimmick but an absolute marvel, strikingly original and deeply affecting. An interspecies love story without a lick of phony sentimentality.
Posted Sep 30, 2025
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4/5
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The Cut
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A real aspect of boxing — dangerously fast weight loss — sports films have ignored becomes body horror we have not seen before. The genre’s motivational clichés get twisted, nastily and poignantly.
Posted Sep 26, 2025
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5/5
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Brash, chaotic, full of bleak humor and bitter irony. With blockbuster vibes over an anarchic indie heart, it’s both earnest and winking. Outstanding in-flight entertainment for our societal freefall.
Posted Sep 25, 2025
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3/5
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Sew Torn
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The quirks of this slightly fantastical black-comedy crime thriller are many, varied, and messily disjointed. But there’s a delicious oddness to its unpredictability and its spin on familiar tropes.
Posted Jun 20, 2025
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5/5
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Black Bag
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Smart, sophisticated spy-versus-spy nonsense makes for a perfect little cinematic contraption. Tense and tricksy, but much more deliciously, these are espionage mind games with a sexy screwball vibe.
Posted Jun 11, 2025
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2/5
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Fountain of Youth
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Hollywood has lost the ability to buckle swash. Guy Ritchie, shamelessly stealing from Indiana Jones, gives us a charmless treasure hunt that feels honed by corporate focus groups and cinematic SEO.
Posted Jun 06, 2025
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2.5/5
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Final Destination Bloodlines
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The dorm-room philosophy of the 25-year-old series is still pondering how wild it is that we all die, how fragile our meatbag bodies are. Now with gory dismemberments and squishy impalements in IMAX!
Posted May 20, 2025
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5/5
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Sinners
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Wildly primal, big and bold, fueled by pain and rage, by community and family, throbbing with love and sex and joy, infused with magic. A sumptuously textured, unmissable howl of a passion project.
Posted May 20, 2025
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3.5/5
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Superboys of Malegaon
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Gentle, charming dramedy about pals in middle-of-nowhere India making amateur movies. The giddy glee in this winsome portrait of geeky passion and enduring friendship is all-around infectious.
Posted Mar 07, 2025
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2.5/5
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When I'm Ready
(2025)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Pretty young people are sad about the end of everything, but there’s no urgency and little emotional authenticity to any of it. We’ve seen this before, pulled off with far more affecting feeling.
Posted Feb 27, 2025
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5/5
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The Apprentice
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A portrait of a weak man, humorless and friendless, desperate to be liked, desperate to be seen as someone who *matters*. Sebastian Stan’s brilliantly disgusting Trump is horrifically riveting.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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2.5/5
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Paddington in Peru
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Colorful but flattened and flimsy, which really grates next to how abundantly, uniquely original the first two movies are. Suffers greatly from the lack of their deft whimsy. It’s, well, bearly there.
Posted Feb 13, 2025
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5/5
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The Brutalist
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Stark and unsentimental, as stubborn and as challenging as its protagonist, and as monumental as his works. Adrien Brody’s performance is extraordinary, full of flinty anger and palpable melancholy.
Posted Jan 15, 2025
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3/5
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Nightbitch
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Replaces the novel’s rage with gentle comedy, biting its tongue and undercutting its protagonist. Still, mundane truths about women’s realities that rarely get public airings are on welcome display.
Posted Dec 04, 2024
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1/5
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Red One
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Unfunny action comedy can’t even pull off sloppy Yuletide kitsch. The anti-chemistry among its likable stars is ‘bested’ only by the ugly CGI. Have some light festive violence — you know, for kids!
Posted Nov 10, 2024
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Blitz
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Picaresque childhood misadventures sketch vibrant WWII London. A movie of brutal randomness, feral intensity, and ferocious intimacy. Wildly human, artistically masterful, and completely magnificent.
Posted Nov 03, 2024
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5/5
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Your Monster
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Sure, the humor may be bitter, the horror may be audacious, and the overriding genre may be ‘anti-romance.’ But this hugely original, grimly delightful howl of feminine rage is actually kinda sweet.
Posted Oct 23, 2024
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4.5/5
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Lee
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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It barely scratches the surface of the enormous audacity of WWII photographer Lee Miller, but still this is an important movie. It’s also joyous filmmaking, with terrific performances all around.
Posted Sep 25, 2024
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5/5
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Robot Dreams
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Immerse yourself in pure unalloyed joy with a sweet, deceptively simple carbon-silicon platonic romance. Even the poignant bittersweetness of this emotional roller coaster is affirming and uplifting.
Posted Aug 06, 2024
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2.5/5
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Twisters
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Hooray for Glen Powell’s star rising, but this absurdly coy movie — is it a sequel? a remake? — is a cowardly, reckless missed opportunity: it’s deeply baffling that it omits any hint of global warming.
Posted Aug 05, 2024
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Nancy Drew -- Reporter
(1939)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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One of the Warner Bros short features, aimed at young audiences, about the teen-girl detective’s adventures, though she’s cast as a rather interfering little brat. Still, it’s good clean fun for kids.
Posted Jul 09, 2024
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Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out
(1989)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Part Jules Verne, part Chuck Jones, A Grand Day Out gives Wallace and Gromit a foil in the strange little whatchamathingie coin-op machine they encounter on the Moon...
Posted Jul 08, 2024
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5/5
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Kinds of Kindness
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A mad monstrosity of a movie: absurdist, enigmatic, perverse. Lanthimos’s typical grotesque humor is on full display. Yay for a film that actually attempts to capture how insane the world is today?
Posted Jun 24, 2024
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2.5/5
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Pitch People
(1999)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The goofy-90s-cheese factor is high in this look at home-shopping TV hucksters, but any nostalgia is small and cheap. The chipper vibe is distasteful in a way it perhaps wasn’t in the booming 1990s.
Posted Jun 03, 2024
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1/5
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IF
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Writer-director John Krasinski’s absolute desperation to whip up magical whimsy utterly fails. No matter how he tries to force enchantment into existence, this is more fever dream than flight of fancy.
Posted May 16, 2024
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2.5/5
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Back to Black
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Marisa Abela is very good as Amy Winehouse, the one saving grace of this cowardly biopic of the wild and wise musician, which hangs its subject out to dry just as the people closest to her did, too.
Posted May 16, 2024
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2.5/5
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The Fall Guy
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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This mess isn’t as clever as it thinks it is, and wastes the small charms of the delicious chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. Feels like they shot a dashed-off first draft of the script.
Posted May 06, 2024
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3/5
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Arcadian
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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It exists safely within the vast subgenre of postcollapse afterscapes, but it does what it does well, with nicely drawn characters, a sense of cultural mythmaking, and freakishly unsettling creatures.
Posted Apr 16, 2024
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3/5
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The Trouble with Jessica
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The pleasures of this black comedy about London real estate and the hypocrisies of posh professionals lie in the terrific cast, especially Shirley Henderson, embodying entertainingly horrible people.
Posted Apr 12, 2024
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1/5
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Civil War
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A spineless dystopian action drama that defaults to a dangerously irresponsible both-sides-ism; its pretense of ‘objectivity’ is unfair to the journalist protagonists the film thinks it’s championing.
Posted Apr 10, 2024
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3.5/5
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Late Night with the Devil
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Uniquely fresh yet also deeply lodged in the history of cinematic horror, with a powerful breakout performance from David Dastmalchian. But its triumph is, ironically, marred by the use of ‘AI’ ‘art.’
Posted Apr 09, 2024
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4.5/5
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Wicked Little Letters
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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An upending of the period costume drama that’s cheerfully indecent, gloriously naughty, and full of female rage at the expectations women operate under. Funny as hell and bursting with impudent energy.
Posted Apr 02, 2024
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4.5/5
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Dune: Part Two
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Ugly, outrageous, brutal, and cynical; a genuinely terrifying film about power and politics as religion and control. There is little escapism here; hits square in the social plexus of horrifying 2024.
Posted Mar 09, 2024
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.5/5
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Madame Web
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A travesty of corporate cynicism. Its desperation to ride Spider-Man’s coattails is pathetic, but its convoluted, coincidence-laden nonsense is duller than you’d imagine: it’s not even so bad it’s fun.
Posted Feb 26, 2024
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5/5
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Stopmotion
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Unusually psychologically astute and utterly unnerving as it digs into the enigmas and anxieties of artistic creation. Style is substance in this challenge to the very concept of an ‘animated movie.’
Posted Feb 25, 2024
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1/5
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Argylle
(2024)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A vacuous multitentacled exercise in pop-culture marketing, and a crass, confused, charmless showcase for Matthew Vaughn’s goes-to-11 hyperactive ‘style’ of unconvincing CGI and frenetic fight scenes.
Posted Feb 09, 2024
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2.5/5
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I.S.S.
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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It looks amazing and the cast is fab, but while this could-happen-tomorrow story wants to appropriate the magic of science fiction, it fails to think imaginatively about longstanding human problems.
Posted Jan 21, 2024
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4.5/5
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Society of the Snow
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A stark, haunting adventure, viscerally terrifying, full of despair, informed by the moral and philosophical quandaries of what it takes to sustain oneself in body and spirit in impossible conditions.
Posted Jan 05, 2024
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5/5
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Maestro
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Oh, frabjous film! Bradley Cooper’s astonishing high-wire act feels classic and modern at the same time: immersive and impressionistic, breathtakingly bold. A kick in the pants to mainstream cinema.
Posted Dec 01, 2023
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4/5
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Godzilla Minus One
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The king of all monsters gets a period-piece reboot, and it’s the closest the series has gotten since to the sincere, unironic horrors of the 1954 original. No comfy escape from terrible reality here.
Posted Nov 30, 2023
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3/5
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Dream Scenario
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Nicolas Cage is comedic in a dry, subtle, nakedly painful way, playing with his ‘Cage rage’ persona; his performance is profoundly moving. I only wish the film was more deserving of what he’s doing.
Posted Nov 26, 2023
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3/5
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Trolls Band Together
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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There is gentle nonstop chaos in the trippy candy-colored assault. Genuinely good-natured, sweet without being sappy, more strange (in a good way) than kids’ movies usually are, and hard to dislike.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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5/5
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When Evil Lurks
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The visceral <i>meatiness</i> of this demonic-possession–infectious-zombie combo hits like a blow. The social and political context for the grotesquerie is even more appalling, and so very pertinent.
Posted Oct 28, 2023
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5/5
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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A great American filmmaker on a memory-holed chapter of American history at the intersection of colonialism and toxic masculinity. Massive, epic, and essential. Scorches the earth of our complacency.
Posted Oct 23, 2023
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Possessed
(2000)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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[S]upports the notion that the truth is usually duller than fiction, and needs to be gussied up a little to make it more dramatic.
Posted Oct 19, 2023
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2/5
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Foe
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The young cast is mesmerizing, but all this dusty dystopia has is vibes and vague metaphors. It only just barely touches on the potential of its science-fiction ideas to explore the human condition.
Posted Oct 19, 2023
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3/5
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Cat Person
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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The cringe of modern relationships stinks up this antiromance. Its bald truths, all but ignored in pop culture, about how women navigate romantic and sexual relationships with men, demand to be heard.
Posted Oct 15, 2023
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2/5
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The Creator
(2023)
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MaryAnn Johanson
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Looks great, but the plot falls apart if you poke it and makes no attempt to grapple with AI’s potential. Instead it renders its robot people as a racialized Other in a clunky metaphor for bigotry.
Posted Oct 04, 2023
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