Movie Reviews
Movie Reviews

Saint X

A lush, exotic resort, a gaggle of blinkered white tourists, and a dead body in the middle: You’d be forgiven for seeing the parallels between “The White Lotus” and Hulu’s latest limited series, “Saint X.”  Based on the acclaimed 2020 novel by Alexis Schaitkin, “Saint X,” on paper, subverts the typical patterns of this kind

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Movie Reviews

Evil Dead Rise movie review & film summary (2023)

The latest in the series, “Evil Dead Rise,” comes from Irish writer/director Lee Cronin, whose 2019 feature debut “The Hole in the Ground” also revolves around sinkholes and mommy issues. Cronin’s grimy sensibility is much closer to that of remake director Fede Alvarez than Raimi’s live-action cartoons. But he does share one key thing with

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Movie Reviews

Little Richard: I Am Everything movie review (2023)

The first “Little Richard Awards Show Moment” was at the 1988 Grammys, when he and Buster Poindexter (aka David Johansen, former frontman of the New York Dolls) presented the award for Best New Artist. Little Richard, resplendent in a shiny brown suit, glanced at Johansen’s towering pompadour and declared, “I used to wear my hair

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Movie Reviews

Somewhere in Queens movie review (2023)

While we’re watching Leo dog-paddle through a manure pit he filled up all by himself, there’s a much more interesting and fresh story happening in the background about a modestly talented high school basketball player who discovers, while suffering and flailing through his first serious relationship, that he enjoys cathartically writing about what he’s going through, and

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Movie Reviews

Cannes 2023 Line-up Includes Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and Many More | Festivals & Awards

Todd Haynes, who premiered his glorious documentary about the Velvet Underground in Cannes last year, is back with “May/December.” It’s apparently about a well-known American couple in which the husband is 23 years younger than his wife and their twins are about to graduate from high school. This may be the year of “Yep—there’s an age

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Movie Reviews

Everything Went Fine

The crisis in “Everything Went Fine” begins in the first moment. Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) sits at a table in her apartment, working. The phone rings. She listens to the caller, whom we don’t hear. She asks, “When? Where?” and then promptly races out the door. Her father has had a stroke, and the caller is

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Movie Reviews

Sweetwater movie review & film summary (2023)

You can sense that condescension in the film’s unnatural development, as seen in commonplace scenes of prejudice: Eric Roberts briefly appears as a bigoted service station owner that shouts the Black Globetrotters away from his gas by touting a double barrel shotgun; a hotel rents a room to the monkey Mr. Bananas rather than the Globetrotters;

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Movie Reviews

The Consummate Collaborator: Bill Butler (1921-2023) | Tributes

Notably, he worked early on with two members of the New American Cinema’s crowded Mount Rushmore: Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. Butler helped change moviemaking with Spielberg” on “Jaws,” and was the cinematographer for my favorite film of all time, and my pick for the best of what seems an impossibly deep, indeed inexhaustible

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Movie Reviews

Ebert Symposium 2023 to Precede Ebertfest on April 18th & 19th | Festivals & Awards

As founder and director of CUIFF, Max has been grateful to see this vision become a reality, and plans are underway for next year’s festival. Additionally, CUIFF is excited for its new partnership with Ebertfest and honored to have one of its films showcasing in the Ebertfest 2023 Short Film Program. To learn more about

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Movie Reviews

One True Loves movie review & film summary (2023)

“One True Loves” is the tale of Emma (Phillipa Soo), a woman caught in romantic limbo. She’s in line to marry Sam (Simu Liu), her best friend since high school, only to have her world shaken when she discovers that her husband, Jesse (Luke Bracey), who has been presumed dead for the last four years

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