Movie Reviews
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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Movie Reviews

Biosphere movie review & film summary (2023)

“Biosphere” has a curious premise that’s briskly unpacked within the movie’s first half hour. [SOME ESSENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW] In that time, insecure Billy (Duplass) and overweening Ray (Brown) discover that they’re not only trapped in a biodome that is running out of food but also that one of the fish that they’re raising for their own

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Movie Reviews

Acting Magic: Alan Arkin (1934-2023) | Tributes

Perhaps the greatest surprise in his career was his Oscar-nominated turn as John Singer, a deaf mute in the 1968 adaptation of Carson McCullers’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” Arkin has no dialogue in the film. His performance is built on glances and gestures; as such, he wears all his emotions on his face

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Movie Reviews

The Passengers of the Night movie review (2023)

“The Passengers of the Night” takes place from 1981—with jubilation in the streets over the election of President François Mitterrand—through 1988. But a constant throughout the movie’s many life changes is the presence of the late-night radio show that gives the film its title. During the wee hours, people call in to share intimate, personal

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Movie Reviews

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken movie review (2023)

Ruby (Lana Condor) and her family live in a coastal village called Oceanside. Her mother, Agatha (Toni Collette), is a successful realtor, her father, Arthur (Colman Domingo), runs a gift shop, and she has an energetic little brother Sam (Blue Chapman). Ruby does not look like the other kids at school. She’s blue. And where

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Movie Reviews

The Witcher Juggles Fun and Frustration In Its Shaky Third Season | TV/Streaming

Blissfully, “The Witcher” remains watchable (witchable?) when it turns its camera back to our happy witching family; the show works best when it’s more “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” than “Game of Thrones.” The dialogue remains delightfully arch, much of the humor still lands (fret not, dear reader, comic relief bard Jaskier [Joey Batey] is back

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Movie Reviews

A Look Back at Tribeca 2023 | Festivals & Awards

Waitress, The Musical – Live on Broadway One of the more highly anticipated films at the festival was “Waitress, The Musical – Live on Broadway,” a filmed version of the stage musical based on the 2007 film by Adrienne Shelly about an unhappily married and newly pregnant waitress who channels her frustrations and anxieties into

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Movie Reviews

God Is a Bullet movie review & film summary (2023)

The opening is a broken canvas of dispersed events: In one instance, a girl with a pink balloon, awaiting her mother outside a supermarket, is snatched by a group of Satanists in a black van. She will grow into Case (Maika Monroe), a blond, tattooed, heroin-addled acolyte of cult leader Cyrus (Karl Glusman). We then

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