Biopic Films
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Bohemian Rhapsody (PG-13)
Strip away the controversy surrounding Bohemian Rhapsody, and all that’s left is a typical awards-bait biopic that’s not as bad as you’d feared. Nor is it as good as you’d hoped; it just sort of exists, with the occasional inspired moment and plenty of dull passages to fill the space in between those. In many ways, there […]
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First Man (PG-13)
The biopic, as a film genre, is a notoriously difficult thing to get right. The problem with much of history, and indeed a great deal of personal history, is that it’s not particularly cinematic because it’s often so internalized. It’s the problem a lot of faith-based films have. How can you quantify a spiritual experience […]
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The Old Man and the Gun (PG-13)
Though he has directed only five feature films in a career of less than a decade, David Lowery’s vision of the cosmos is already more clearly defined than most directors achieve in a lifetime. 2013’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, 2016’s Pete’s Dragon, and 2017’s A Ghost Story are all united by a soulful, lyrical quality […]
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (PG-13)
Mr. Fred Rogers, the star of Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, not only challenges the concept of love, but what it is to express it. Mr. Rogers believed that everyone had God-given intrinsic value that made them lovable and capable of loving one another, whereas most people feel or are told that in order to be loved they […]
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Jackie (R)
The aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy is shown twice in Pablo Larraín’s Jackie. The first time the camera glides along behind the motorcade before swooping stylishly overhead to offer a brief, obscured glimpse at the President’s dead body slumped over in his wife’s lap. Then it is over. The presentation is slick, […]
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Snowden: Propaganda and the Mundane Beasts It Makes (R)
Oliver Stone is one of the few directors whose auteurism is his ideology. While he has hit a few correct notes (mostly in the Adagio for Strings sequences of Platoon) there is very little about his directorial style—no signature montages or lengthy tracking shots—that say “Oliver Stone” the way that his completely misinformed takes on […]
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Control (R)
I once spent an afternoon on Babblefish, inputting English song lyrics, translating them into other languages, then translating them back into English to see how they’d changed. Something hidden but true might be discovered within the English that would only come to light when the English was subjected to the grammatical rules of another language. […]