Movie Reviews
Movie Reviews

Mike Flanagan Finds New Power in Story of “Carrie”

Three or four episodes into Mike Flanagan’s visceral, searing, and provocative eight-part adaptation of “Carrie,” something occurred to me: I had forgotten to be scared. Maybe it’s because we’ve seen so many adaptations and updates of Stephen King’s classic 1974 novel, from Brian De Palma’s masterful and terrifying 1976 film to the stage work “Carrie:

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Movie Reviews

Short Films in Focus: Busy Bodies (with Kate Renshaw-Lewis)

Kate Renshaw-Lewis’ “Busy Bodies” is the kind of film I love to program for a shorts block, but it’s not the easiest to write about. Six minutes long, abstract, and open to interpretation, the film is a compelling, weird delight that I have watched many times and still find something odd and new each time. (Unfortunately,

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Movie Reviews

The Possibility of Forgiveness: Reed Van Dyk, Boyd Holbrook, Hiam Abbass, and Kenneth Branagh on “Atonement”

From the opening moments of director Reed Van Dyk’s “Atonement,” the film subverts tropes and expands what war films (and their harrowing aftermath) can be. Shot on a warm, 16mm film by cinematographer Jon Peter, the film opens with a family in Iraq going about their quotidian rhythms for an extended period of time before

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Movie Reviews

Formative Action Series Comes Roaring Back with “Gears of War: E-Day”

As a hallmark of the Xbox 360 era, “Gears of War” was a franchise that really cemented the nitty gritty third-person cover shooter genre into the cultural video game zeitgeist. The muted earth tones of the first three games set the stage for a bloody and visceral world filled with war and monsters. When the

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Movie Reviews

HBO’s “War” Bares Its Teeth, But Lacks a Considerable Bite 

Created by George Kay, HBO’s new series “War” follows tech billionaire Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) and his movie-star wife, Carla Duval (Sienna Miller), whose marriage is colder than the dreary London weather. When we first meet him, he sleeps with a young woman who is clearly not his wife, but the morning after their tryst,

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Movie Reviews

Adult Swim’s “Get Jiro” Serves Up Bloody, Sloppy Culinary Revenge

It’s funny, looking back on 2026, that we’ll have gotten two televisual glimpses into the mind of the late, great chef and food writer Anthony Bourdain. One, Matt Johnson’s wry, tender biopic “Tony,” gives us a glimpse of the man’s larval form, the insecure, manipulative boy before he became the Tony we all knew and

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Movie Reviews

I’m Not Going Anywhere: Twiggy and Sadie Frost on “Twiggy”

In 1966, photographer Barry Lategan scheduled a test shoot: a model’s first-ever photo shoot, meant to market her to other photographers and brands. That model was 15-year-old Leslie Hornby, a slim, boyish girl with a pixie cut and penciled lashes, and those photos became some of the most recognizable fashion portraits ever taken.  Deemed “The

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Movie Reviews

TIFF 2026: A Canadian Critic Looks At This Year’s Fest

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival has wrapped, the culmination of eleven days showcasing hundreds of films, with thousands of patrons experiencing some of the best (and worst) of world cinema in 2026. A half million people came down to King Street on the opening weekend as part of the festival’s activation, taking in food

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Movie Reviews

Fantastic Fest 2026: Into the Sky, Play House, Posthumous

There’s an amazing bit of trivia about how there are so many possible shuffles of a deck of cards that it’s almost certain that every single one ever shuffled has been as distinct as a snowflake. I thought of this when considering the panoply of meet-cutes in cinema history: There’s always a new one for

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Movie Reviews

TIFF 2026: Arrested Memory, Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, Vintage Violence

The Midnight Madness section at TIFF has a reputation for its histrionics and crowd-pleasing thrills, but it’s also a programming block that stealthily introduces delightful eccentricities off the beaten path. I love projects like “River,” “The Furious,” and “The Shadow Strays,” but they don’t even scratch the surface of the kind of weird that has

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