Movie Reviews
Movie Reviews

The Beasts movie review & film summary (2023)

Thankfully, co-writer/director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s focus on Antoine and Xan’s emotionally charged stalemate keeps “The Beasts” from devolving into yet another quasi-artful and pseudo-moral genre movie that pits intolerant bumpkins against ignorant city-slickers. Mood trumps morality in “The Beasts,” partly because Sorogoyen, in collaboration with director of photography Alejandro de Pablo, art director Jose Tirado, and

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Movie Reviews

Futurama Returns with Uneven but Often Funny New Season on Hulu | TV/Streaming

The real draw of a new season of “Futurama” is the return of beloved characters and the performers who voice them. Billy West, Katey Sagal, John DiMaggio, Phil LaMarr, and Lauren Tom are back. And not only does the voice work feel entirely of a piece with where the show was at in the 2000s

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Movie Reviews

While We Watched movie review (2023)

It takes time for “While We Watched” to find momentum: Shukla’s vérité approach spends the first half hour or so notating the broad problem. What follows is a series of blaring clips of blustering Indian anchors vying for the public’s attention by offering up polarizing red meat. For them, that amounts to denouncing any dissenter

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Movie Reviews

Fear the Night movie review & film summary (2023)

With “Fear the Night,” LaBute clearly aims to push viewers’ buttons, especially using the oft-repeated threat of sexual violence. Some dramatic irony mildly re-casts the movie’s otherwise formulaic conflict in a harsher light, but not much gets complicated by this extra knowledge, especially not LaBute’s tin-eared dialogue nor his indifferent direction. In theory, Tess and

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Movie Reviews

Insanely Fun: Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson on After Hours | Interviews

AR: I think the best comedy is born out of reality, and there is a lot of reality in the movie in the sense that everyone has had a really, really bad night. This might be the worst night that you ever had, but it was never played for comedy. It was played for realism

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Movie Reviews

Final Cut movie review & film summary (2023)

Remi’s feelings about making a zombie movie are quickly sublimated into the process of making a zombie movie. He paces up and down naturally lit hallways and staircases, either fills in or delegates last-minute problem-solving, and generally tries to keep everybody happy. He especially wants to please his wife and daughter Romy (Simone Hazanavicius, the

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Movie Reviews

Two Tickets to Greece movie review (2023)

They end up at a small, rustic inn. Happy wherever she is, Magalie dances joyfully on the patio (and on a tabletop), where the other guests are having dinner. In a very sweet moment, as Blandine watches, she sees Magalie not as she is now but as she was when they were friends, imagining dancing

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Movie Reviews

Quicksand movie review & film summary (2023)

From there, we meet the couple who are the story’s focus. They have left their young children in the States, and we slowly realize their marriage has collapsed. The idea of a failing couple in peril far from home is intriguing—it makes one imagine a hybrid of Ingmar Bergman and “Deliverance.” But the script fails

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Movie Reviews

Mack Bates Starring Onstage in Our Town | Chaz’s Journal

At the ripe age of 12, award-winning writer and aspiring filmmaker Bates announced that he wanted to be “the Black Peter Jennings.” This followed his earlier desire to be an astronaut and a cowboy. He’s sat through SpaceCamp, more times than he cares to share, and thanks to his tenure as a boy scout, has

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Movie Reviews

The Out-Laws movie review & film summary (2023)

Devine’s character, Owen Browning, is a bank manager, despite being so cloddish and lacking in judgment or impulse control that it’s hard to imagine him being trusted to take a bag of garbage to the curb. His fiancee Parker (Nina Dobrev), is a yoga instructor everyone in Owen’s family inexplicably thinks is a stripper. She’s pleasant and conventionally

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