Movie Reviews
Movie Reviews

Radical Whimsy: Exploring the Creative Mind of Boots Riley

Boots Riley is the most dangerous man in Hollywood. He’s not a filmmaker. He is an enigma, a revolutionary fighting against capitalism with a pen and a lens. From his musical prowess as the frontman for the conscious hip-hop group The Coup to his community activism with the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) and California’s

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Movie Reviews

What is the State of the Black Movie Star?

While watching Kristoffer Borgli’s “The Drama,” I thought a lot about Zendaya’s Blackness within the shell of this character. The film never questions her identity in any meaningful way. We know that she is biracial; this is acknowledged in the film’s text. We may also surmise that her race played some role in her bullying and

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Movie Reviews

Film Criticism’s Crisis in the Letterboxd Era

The digital war between critics and audiences isn’t new, but it has seemingly reached a disconcerting inflection point this year. Populist hits based on beloved IPs have garnered fervent reactions from fans who reject criticism and accuse critics of bias, pretentiousness, or both. This prolonged stretch of backlash feels especially precarious amid a film industry

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Movie Reviews

Roger Ebert’s Best and Worst Alien Movies

Steven Spielberg’s fourth film about alien encounters is “Disclosure Day,” following “ET: The Extra-Terrestrial,” “War of the Worlds,” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” That inspired us to take another look at what Roger Ebert thought about some of the most famous and infamous alien movies, from the inspiring and friendly to the terrorizing

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Movie Reviews

British Comedy “Alice & Steve” Leaps Over the Age Gap

Hulu’s “Alice & Steve” is wild, uneven, very funny, and surprisingly insightful, even if it’s the kind of show you think you might hate. The first episode establishes the premise: Alice (Nicola Walker) and Steve (Jemaine Clement) are longtime friends now in their fifties. He’s recently divorced, and she’s married with two kids, one in

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Movie Reviews

AMC Turns “Interview With a Vampire” Into the Delicious, Malicious “The Vampire Lestat”

It finally happened. “Interview with the Vampire” has become “The Vampire Lestat.” Season three of the AMC series goes wild with a full transformation into the long-awaited, much-anticipated adaptation of the second book in The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Books 1 and 2 have seen feature film renditions, but no one knew how to

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Movie Reviews

60th Karlovy Vary Film Festival Announces Official Selection and Juries

A celebratory Karlovy Vary International Film Festival revealed its competition lineups on Tuesday. The 60th edition, which will commemorate the 80-year anniversary of the festival’s founding, features a dozen world premieres competing for the Crystal Globe and another dozen films bowing in Proxima–including cinema hailing from Colombia and Myanmar.    The Czech fest, located in a

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Movie Reviews

Hulu’s Limp Sitcom “Not Suitable for Work” Is Hardly Suitable for Primetime

The hangout sitcom has a few, set-in-stone principles: an attractive, charming cast, struggling to balance the demands of work and love, wrangling an array of neuroses and errors of judgment. When their professional and personal worlds begin to overlap, the narrative ought to become funnier and deeper. Unfortunately, “Not Suitable for Work,” like creator Mindy

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Movie Reviews

The Unloved, Part 150: Laggies

Having just come off the set of a movie and renewed my appreciation for accidents, deadlines, compromises, and heartbreak, I thought I’d look back at the work of the much-missed Lynn Shelton, one of the finest unsung American romantic directors. Shelton decided, sadly, what turned out to be more than halfway through her life, that

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Movie Reviews

“For All Mankind” Spinoff “Star City” is One Small Soviet Step Backward

In the wake of five seasons of “For All Mankind“‘s alt-history time-jumping—currently, we’re in an alternate 2012 where we’ve colonized Mars, and a still-alive John Lennon teamed up with Jay-Z to produced “The Grey Album”—it’s easy to forget the show started as a simple 1960s period piece, with a twist: What if the Russians got

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