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3/5
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Shazam! Fury of the Gods
(2023)
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Neal Pollack
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Like the first Shazam! movie, it has a warm heart and semi-believable family relationships. It certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s noisy and obnoxious, but also kind of fun.
Posted Mar 31, 2023
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3/5
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Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
(2023)
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Neal Pollack
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In the era of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, where every fantasy moment is full of portent and ominousness, the Dungeons and Dragons movie instead makes the bold statement that these kinds of worlds can be fun and stupid.
Posted Mar 31, 2023
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Devil's Peak
(2023)
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William Schwartz
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The setting of suffocatingly pointless rural America is a timeless one. Jacob McNeeley’s end of the story, by contrast, engages in cliches, and not even very good ones.
Posted Mar 22, 2023
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Ice Merchants
(2022)
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William Schwartz
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Existentialist in its depiction of a father and son in a daily grind to deliver ice from their mountainside home to the town down below…by skydiving.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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The Flying Sailor
(2022)
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William Schwartz
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Brief and existentialist in its depiction of an olde tyme sailor hurtling to and from the heavens in the wake of a massive explosion.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Haulout
(2022)
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William Schwartz
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Very little actually happens in Haulout, but the documentary is fascinating for its live depiction of a giant herd of walruses just overwhelming the little island and being very loud.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Stranger at the Gate
(2022)
|
William Schwartz
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Documentaries aren’t generally structured around plot twists. Well, Stranger at the Gate is, to the documentary’s detriment.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Night Ride
(2020)
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William Schwartz
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Awkward both mechanically, since she doesn’t know how to operate the tram, but also socially, since she also doesn’t know how to deescalate scuffles between passengers.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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It's a Wonderful Binge
(2022)
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William Schwartz
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The trouble with It’s A Wonderful Binge is that there isn’t anywhere for the story to escalate to. When we open up with mascots punching kids and the Christmas Owl going on a rampage, there’s not really a more intense setting.
Posted Mar 16, 2023
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Aurora's Sunrise
(2022)
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William Schwartz
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We actually see Aurora on the run, the genuinely alien nature of this horrifying context aptly reflected through art that’s recognizably human, yet placed from a different era.
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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Eternal Spring
(2022)
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William Schwartz
|
There’s no way to sugarcoat this. Eternal Spring is a Falun Gong propaganda film.
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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3/5
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Creed III
(2023)
|
Neal Pollack
|
Creed 3 has the wrong protagonist. We should be rooting for Dame Anderson, not against him.
Posted Mar 03, 2023
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From Where They Stood
(2021)
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William Schwartz
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From Where We Stood is among the most pretentious and pointless documentaries I have ever seen, and this isn’t a designation I put upon the movie lightly.
Posted Mar 01, 2023
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3/5
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Emily
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
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Emily takes great literary works and places them in surface of a standard romance-novel weeper with a pretentious NPR gloss.
Posted Mar 01, 2023
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Magazine Dreams
(2023)
|
Sara Stewart
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Jonathan Majors is spectacular as an aspiring bodybuilder in this uber-intense drama.
Posted Jan 31, 2023
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3/5
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A Man Called Otto
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
It contains enough truth to make the movie a hit among grownups looking back on their own lives with a mixture of happy nostalgia and wistful regret.
Posted Jan 16, 2023
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4/5
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Emily the Criminal
(2022)
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Neal Pollack
|
Emily the Criminal is great at portraying the side of L.A. that we all know and love from classic noir, but also contemporizing it.
Posted Jan 09, 2023
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3/5
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Babylon
(2022)
|
Stephen Garrett
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Its go-for-broke 40-minute pre-credit 1926 bacchanal must set some sort of record for most baroque lunacy in a studio film.
Posted Dec 23, 2022
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4/5
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
(2022)
|
Stephen Garrett
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Both ridiculously opulent and opulently ridiculous, Glass Onion skewers the rich while wallowing in their excesses.
Posted Dec 21, 2022
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4/5
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Avatar: The Way of Water
(2022)
|
Sara Stewart
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Delivers on its promise of expanding the scope of Pandora.
Posted Dec 19, 2022
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4/5
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She Said
(2022)
|
Sara Stewart
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No gratuitous reenactments of assault, no horrifying climactic events... It's riveting.
Posted Nov 29, 2022
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3/5
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The Menu
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
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Like Triangle of Sadness but with a pulpier sensibility, The Menu purports to be a takedown of the overconsumption habits of the super-rich.
Posted Nov 18, 2022
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4/5
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All Quiet on the Western Front
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
A visceral and mostly effective German adaptation of one of the grimmest and greatest anti-war novels ever written.
Posted Nov 04, 2022
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4/5
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Triangle of Sadness
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
Triangle invites us to feel bad about ourselves, and, in doing so, we end up celebrating the very things it criticizes. We end up admiring the movie from a distance, like it’s a model in a runway show that’s projecting Karl Marx quotes on the rear wall.
Posted Oct 25, 2022
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2/5
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Black Adam
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
A needlessly dark pile of steaming genre trash that takes itself way more seriously than it should, Black Adam is still pretty entertaining in parts.
Posted Oct 22, 2022
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2/5
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Ticket to Paradise
(2022)
|
Sara Stewart
|
You could feed a bot a steady diet of ’90s entries in this genre and it would spit out something approximating Ticket to Paradise.
Posted Oct 22, 2022
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2/5
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Amsterdam
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
At once pretentious and self-important but also snarky and nearly nonsensical, ‘Amsterdam’ is one of the least pleasant, most inaccessible movies of the year.
Posted Oct 11, 2022
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3/5
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Don't Worry Darling
(2022)
|
Sara Stewart
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Don’t Worry Darling would have crushed if it had come out in the 1970s.
Posted Sep 26, 2022
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4/5
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Moonage Daydream
(2022)
|
Sara Stewart
|
Moonage Daydream is more a vibe than a narrative.
Posted Sep 22, 2022
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3/5
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See How They Run
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
It never takes itself too seriously, and spends a good amount of the runtime winking at its own existence.
Posted Sep 19, 2022
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2/5
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Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
(2022)
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Neal Pollack
|
At moments, Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. wants audiences to laugh at the excess and hypocrisy, but this situation isn’t actually funny, so instead it just feels uncomfortable.
Posted Sep 06, 2022
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3/5
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Bodies Bodies Bodies
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
A frenetic, bloody satire of aimless, wealthy, overeducated youth.
Posted Aug 29, 2022
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3/5
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Thirteen Lives
(2022)
|
Sara Stewart
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For all its scuba-diving wizardry, the film’s title is the extent of the detail you’ll get about the kids at its center.
Posted Aug 10, 2022
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4/5
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Vengeance
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
It’s not a perfect movie, a little too self-assured and self-loving, but it gets a lot about Texas right, a lot about media jerks right, and a lot right about a lot in general.
Posted Aug 02, 2022
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RRR
(2022)
|
William Schwartz
|
Wild, bromantic spectacle. With little more than hand gestures, our swarthy heroes rescue children, wrestle tigers with their bare hands, and even team up piggyback to shoot down their imperial nemeses.
Posted Jul 21, 2022
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18 1/2
(2021)
|
William Schwartz
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What matters to 18½ isn’t the exact vibe of the era as it is the greater satire.
Posted Jul 21, 2022
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The Will to See
(2022)
|
William Schwartz
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Pretty much the only thing you’re likely to learn is that Bernard-Henri Levy is a very cool, very serious dude, especially when he helps Kurdish fighters set up a flag outside of some caves.
Posted Jul 21, 2022
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Marmaduke
(2022)
|
William Schwartz
|
Just a bad movie, in such a way I can barely even remember what the jokes were supposed to be.
Posted Jul 21, 2022
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Charlotte
(2021)
|
William Schwartz
|
‘Charlotte’ states its thesis clearly enough early on. You can’t expect life to love you. Rather, you have to choose to love life.
Posted Jul 21, 2022
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Worst to First: The True Story of Z100 New York
(2022)
|
William Schwartz
|
Worst to First: The True Story of Z100 New York is a charming story in part because its a depiction of a world where this kind of moralizing from celebrities and media platforms didn’t exist.
Posted Jul 21, 2022
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Rifkin's Festival
(2020)
|
William Schwartz
|
Rifkin’s Festival features a surprising twist on the usual Allen formula...there’s actually a fair amount of humility.
Posted Jul 13, 2022
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President
(2021)
|
William Schwartz
|
The low-context President...does little to explain what Zimbabwe’s democracy is and why opposition candidate Nelson Chamisa has so much faith in it when the country is notorious for Robert Mugabe ruling it with an iron fist.
Posted Jul 13, 2022
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5/5
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Lost Illusions
(2021)
|
Neal Pollack
|
"One of the best movie adaptations of a classic novel ever made."
Posted Jun 29, 2022
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Cha Cha Real Smooth
(2022)
|
Asher Luberto
|
[Raiff is] one of the few directors who knows how these people act, cope, feel and communicate, and he once again proves to be the voice of their dancing generation.
Posted Jun 22, 2022
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4/5
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Crimes of the Future
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
What starts as a weird body-horror satire of the art world turns into a profound meditation on the future of the human race.
Posted Jun 06, 2022
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3/5
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The Bob's Burgers Movie
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
"Essentially an overlong average episode of a sweet, inoffensive animated sitcom."
Posted May 25, 2022
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Men
(2022)
|
Neal Pollack
|
An extended metaphor in search of a storyline, a horror allegory looking for an audience. It never quite pins down the first goal, and because of that will never quite achieve the second. This is a cult movie by definition, and seemingly by design.
Posted May 20, 2022
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Hatching
(2022)
|
Asher Luberto
|
There is depth, real depth here, and if it doesn't seem apparent in every scene, it's lurking just below the surface.
Posted May 04, 2022
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The Duke
(2020)
|
Asher Luberto
|
In the tradition of his earlier work, Michell has elegantly interspersed the intrigue of The Duke with snippets of humor that give everything a laid-back feel.
Posted Apr 25, 2022
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Out of the Blue
(1980)
|
William Schwartz
|
The film begins and ends with her yelling about punk music into a ham radio to whatever person out there might be listening. Cebe is angry and frustrated in a way not that different from how a lot of people are today.
Posted Apr 07, 2022
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