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3.5/4
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New Strains
(2023)
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Walter Chaw
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New Strains doesn't only make you take sides between the sometimes ugly coping mechanisms of Kallia and Ram--it also reopens barely-healed wounds you might still be nursing...
Posted Nov 28, 2023
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1.5/4
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Wish
(2023)
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Walter Chaw
|
It's possible to catch the zeitgeist express and still suck, and here's the proof: Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck's flaccid, disturbing, Les Miz-for-kids Disney flick, Wish.
Posted Nov 28, 2023
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1/4
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Farrey
(2023)
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Walter Chaw
|
Imagine the version of this written and directed by Boots Riley. Now think about why he doesn't get this sort of budget, yet Emerald Fennell does.
Posted Nov 28, 2023
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2.5/4
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Cobweb
(2023)
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Walter Chaw
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Cobweb has edges on it that catch in the throat; it's a confection designed for consumption but laden with self-consciousness and even defensiveness.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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4/4
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Monster
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Monster is beautiful in its awful humanity. I am blessed to have seen it once, and I'll never watch it again.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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3/4
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In Water
(2023)
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Walter Chaw
|
In Water, aside from being out of focus, has something to say about how the creative process is mostly about existing in the moment and staying in tune with elements that others might overlook.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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0/4
|
Quiz Lady
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Bully for underrepresented creators making a movie the ruling class has been making since pictures started moving, I guess. Progress ain't what it used to be.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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The Secret Art of Human Flight
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Rosenmeyer is good as a discount Steve Carell, Raci is in typically fine form, and I do appreciate the movie's similarities to high-concept comedies like Burt Reynolds's The End and Gregg Champion's Short Time and Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life...
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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2/4
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Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
(2023)
|
Angelo Muredda
|
[It] leaves the compelling Montpetit with little to do but arch her eyebrow and look quizzical, something she can seemingly do in her sleep.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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4/4
|
Rosemary's Baby
(1968)
|
Bill Chambers
|
Krzysztof Komeda's score sounds lush enough, and the track delivers all those muffled, half-heard conversations with an uncanny dislocation despite the absence of stereo imaging.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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4/4
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Rosemary's Baby
(1968)
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Walter Chaw
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Rosemary is everything. He's just Guy. It's that tension--between a woman fully actualized and a man forever frustrated, the Grail vs. the Knights of the Round Table--that serves as the tightrope...
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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2.5/4
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Tempting for a less thoughtful and empathetic white filmmaker to tell this story from the Osage point of view...and, yes, the film is good. It's a straight-line slog with a tension wire held across its proverbial forehead for the duration, but good? Sure.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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3.5/4
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Priscilla
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Priscilla is a Sofia Coppola joint; if it's predictable, at least it's predictably great.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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2/4
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Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
(2023)
|
Angelo Muredda
|
The biggest problem, though, is the shallowness hinted at by the title, which reduces complex concepts and identities to buzzwords...
Posted Oct 18, 2023
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4/4
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When Evil Lurks
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
When Evil Lurks is full of images I will never shake because they’ve been delivered via the cinematic equivalent of a hypodermic needle. Demián Rugna is the truth. All hail.
Posted Oct 13, 2023
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1/4
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The Creator
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh every single time Joshua screams "Alphie!..."
Posted Oct 06, 2023
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3.5/4
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Fallen Leaves
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Kaurismäki's pictures engage in the same slowing-down, the same understated dialogue, the same complexity of emotion.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3/4
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The Teachers’ Lounge
(2023)
|
Bill Chambers
|
The haunting final shot is a loss for everyone involved in a way that doesn't feel equivocating or cynical, just quietly tragic.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3/4
|
Anatomy of a Fall
(2023)
|
Angelo Muredda
|
The kind of winding, enigmatic character study that people who miss reading literary fiction wistfully describe as "novelistic."
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3/4
|
The Zone of Interest
(2023)
|
Angelo Muredda
|
I haven't been able to stop thinking about The Zone of Interest, about how Glazer switches suddenly at key points to an infrared vision of a small Polish girl lugging a bagful of apples around in the pitch black...
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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2.5/4
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I Don't Know Who You Are
(2023)
|
Bill Chambers
|
I thought a lot about Agnès Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7, of which this film is something of a micro-budget Canadian update.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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1/4
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Nyad
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
It either wins the middlebrow's greatest honour, thus enriching its producers, or it fails to do so. But are these movies any good? I wouldn't know how to begin to answer that question.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3.5/4
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El Conde
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
El Conde is the bitterest of farces: a satire of excess and great evil that uses vampirism as a blunt metaphor for the forces that sap places and entire peoples of their share of a nation's fortunes.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3/4
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Seven Veils
(2023)
|
Angelo Muredda
|
Atom Egoyan hits his stride again in Seven Veils, a playful and self-reflexive backstage drama...
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3.5/4
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Evil Does Not Exist
(2023)
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Angelo Muredda
|
Evil Does Not Exist is a terse, powerful turn to what you might call the horror of the Anthropocene, where a poisoned natural landscape and its stewards reassert themselves with the blunt materials at hand.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3/4
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Smugglers
(2023)
|
Bill Chambers
|
... a touching and remarkably subtle bit of friendship-as-destiny, appropriately smuggled like contraband into a formulaic yarn.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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2/4
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Sleep
(2023)
|
Bill Chambers
|
As it stands, Sleep had me at hello--and lost me by goodbye.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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4/4
|
All of Us Strangers
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
All of Us Strangers is a love story and a tragedy, a fantasy and a horror film, a drama and a sexy romance--sexy and doomed.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3.5/4
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Menus-Plaisirs: Les Troisgros
(2023)
|
Angelo Muredda
|
César doesn't hear the compliment, but we do, and we're left to wonder what the next phase of the restaurant might look like, without Michel and Marie-Pierre to guide it and Wiseman to document it...
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3/4
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Daddio
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Daddio is a lovely start to Hall's career. I'm excited to see the other stops she makes along the way.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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3.5/4
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Seagrass
(2023)
|
Bill Chambers
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Hama-Brown is someone to watch; she even makes us care about a blanket and a closet door.
Posted Sep 30, 2023
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2/4
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Ultimate X: The Movie
(2002)
|
Bill Chambers
|
Ultimate X is a commercial for the X-Games that undersells its own product by cutting to commentary from personnel in which they overstress that "we ain't seen nothin' yet." You start to wonder, If that's the case, why do you keep making me [watch]?
Posted Sep 12, 2023
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4/4
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Poor Things
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
It's a Luis Buñuel film with the visual sensibility of Terry Gilliam...
Posted Sep 08, 2023
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0.5/4
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Fingernails
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
If you ever wondered what a tuneless Yorgos Lanthimos rip-off would look like, Christos Nikou's Fingernails has your answer.
Posted Sep 08, 2023
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1/4
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Cassandro
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I wish Cassandro had been made by someone like John Waters, who might appreciate the camp, or even Alejandro González Iñárritu, who would at least try to capture some of the iconography of a gripping cultural movement.
Posted Sep 08, 2023
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2.5/4
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The Royal Hotel
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I'll soon forget its title and begin to conflate it with other movies.
Posted Sep 08, 2023
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2.5/4
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New Life
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I respect the directness and simplicity of John Rosman's New Life, the way it addresses a double-edged problem through two women in separate storylines who represent the point and counterpoint of a debate without an easy answer.
Posted Aug 25, 2023
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3/4
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Pandemonium
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
French multidisciplinary artist Quarxx's sophomore feature Pandemonium is relentless miserablism presented handsomely and with neither of the usual pressure valves of archness or irony. It's punishing.
Posted Aug 25, 2023
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2.5/4
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The Last Voyage of the Demeter
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I do wonder what Øvredal would have made of a Norse monster rather than one born of a British imagination. For what it is, it's good enough.
Posted Aug 25, 2023
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4/4
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birth/rebirth
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Birth/Rebirth horrified me because I empathized with everyone in it: with the doctor, with the nurse, even with the monster.
Posted Aug 25, 2023
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3.5/4
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Blackout
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Fallout is inevitable after an apocalypse, after all, and fault lines cause earthquakes.
Posted Aug 05, 2023
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3.5/4
|
Vincent Must Die
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
It's brilliant, in other words, and riding the tube of this zeitgeist...
Posted Aug 05, 2023
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2.5/4
|
Aporia
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Aporia delivers, for the most part.
Posted Aug 05, 2023
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3.5/4
|
Raging Grace
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
It's a horrorshow, but if you're lucky, there's grace at the end of the tunnel.
Posted Aug 05, 2023
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0.5/4
|
Sympathy for the Devil
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Cage can be an exceptional actor when he wants to be, don't get me wrong. I just wish he wanted to be more than once every ten years.
Posted Aug 05, 2023
|
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2/4
|
Shortcomings
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
If only Shortcomings dealt with him honestly instead of offering him redemption without his having hit rock bottom.
Posted Aug 05, 2023
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3/4
|
Evil Dead Rise
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
It's a strong entry in a strong franchise. I hope Raimi does the next one.
Posted Jul 28, 2023
|
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4/4
|
After Hours
(1985)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I have spent 40 years in swoony thrall to this movie. I tremble every single time I watch it. After Hours is an object lesson in sonder.
Posted Jul 24, 2023
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2.5/4
|
Oppenheimer
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
I want Oppenheimer to succeed, because its ambitious and epically-scaled mediocrity is still preferable to the too-many-cooks algorithmic disasters dominating the marketplace.
Posted Jul 24, 2023
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1/4
|
Barbie
(2023)
|
Walter Chaw
|
Barbie is a movie about Barbie made with the political awareness, consistency, and intelligence of the doll. Perhaps realizing it's in deep water without a swimming lesson...
Posted Jul 24, 2023
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