Drama Films
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Dunkirk: The Better Part of Valour (PG-13)
There is an unspoken understanding among filmmakers that war is hell and that war films must convince their audiences of it. And it isn’t a controversial notion. The guy who exits the theater nodding sagely and remarks, “Man, war is hell,” can’t expect much pushback from his buddies. Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk contributes to the genre […]
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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (PG-13)
Gareth Edwards’ Rogue One: A Star Wars Story feels nothing like any other Star Wars film. At first, that’s jarring, even off-putting. Once you settle into its particular rhythm, it’s exhilarating. There is no opening crawl of yellow text setting up the story. There are no Kurosawa-esque wipes to transition between scenes. The story isn’t […]
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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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A Gritty Goodness: The River Thief (Not Rated)
The typical hero of a faith-based film measures their own satisfaction with the ending by the metric ton. If you stuck a teaspoon in the ending of the average Christian film, you’d pull it out dripping with enough sweet goo to give everyone in the world a mouthful of cavities. We don’t merely like redemption. […]
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God’s Not Dead 2: First World Problems (PG)
If courage is a mark of greatness in film making, God’s Not Dead 2 is deserving of more than a few laurels. It takes real guts to give a movie called God’s Not Dead 2 a theatrical release date of April 1st. If the release date is analogous to riding a motorcycle without a helmet, […]
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Captain America: Civil War (PG-13)
This is the zenith of Marvel’s storytelling method. Over the past eight years – a time period winkingly referred to in the film – the studio has built an intricately interconnected “cinematic universe” through thirteen feature films. This model has drawbacks and benefits, both of which I discuss at length in my essay on The […]
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Spotlight: For the Sins of the World (R)
In The Brothers Karamazov, Elder Zosima addresses the monks at his abbey a few days before his death. He urges them to love one another and then reminds them that, though they have dedicated their lives to God, they are no more righteous than those who live outside the monastery walls. He says, “When [the […]
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Karma sans Justice: The Big Short (R)
Nerds are the last to finish first, but, if The Big Short is to be believed, that might be just about the best time to get ahead. Nerds have a sense of this. They might fall behind the jocks on the sporting fields and have all of the humiliating wedgies in high school; they might […]
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The Hateful Eight (R)
2015 was a banner year for westerns. The genre, once one of Hollywood’s most profitable and now one of its least – the financial disaster of 2013’s unjustly reviled extravaganza The Lone Ranger was the final nail in that coffin – seemed doomed to fade into obscurity. However, rather than living on solely through the occasional indie […]
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Macbeth: Post-traumatic Stress and the Pre-Christian World (R)
Shakespeare wouldn’t be Shakespeare if we did not have reasons to argue about him. Part of what makes his plays so enduring is their ability to tolerate the conjunctions “both … and …” However, it does make writing about him always a challenge, even though thousands (millions, if you include students) have done so before. […]
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Creed: Winning the Fight for Relevance (PG-13)
An athlete born in the year (1976, that is) that Rocky Balboa first fought on the silver screen would probably be nearing retirement now, if he or she had not retired already. But Balboa himself (played, as always, by Sylvester Stallone) keeps turning up. This is not without risks of seeming exploitative. Worse, it is not […]
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My Life With The Chill Kill Cult: Martha Marcy May Marlene (R)
Where do flashbacks come from? Who delivers the flashback to the audience? Is it the same authorial power which delivers the present tense narrative to the audience? And who is privy to the flashback? If the flashback occurs in the mind of a present character, should the flashback be trusted less than the objectively rendered […]
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The Martian: The Art of Not Knowing a Place for the First Time (PG-13)
If there is a reason why Americans do not easily cease from exploration it is because, for us, knowing a place for the first time is a horrifying prospect. English colonial writers had a sense of place and Russian novelists a sense of space, but Americans have always been most at home on the frontier—a […]
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Sicario: The World after the Monopoly of Violence (R)
If Sicario wants you to know one thing, it’s that good fences make good neighbors; especially wrought iron fences, fences that are topped off with razor wire, lined with infrared cameras and maybe have a guard tower with a mounted machine gun or two every half mile. To see the film’s portrayal of Mexico, one […]
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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. […]
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Black Mass: The Cost of Looking the Other Way (R)
Bostonians can rest assured that, unlike his earlier crime film Out of the Furnace, their home city is portrayed as being remediable. It does not even seem to be particularly corrupt. What it is, however, is tribal, with the Irish and Italians constantly at one another’s throats. It is a tribalism which not only defines allegiances in the criminal underworld but also among police and federal authorities.
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Good Kill: The Banality Of Slaughter? (R)
“It is well that war is so terrible, lest we should grow too fond of it,” says Robert E. Lee. Most veterans, from the Bunker Hill to Afghanistan, would agree with this statement. But what happens if war ceases to be so terrible? This is the question at the center of Good Kill, the latest from […]
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Judging Your Neighbor : Two Days, One Night (PG-13)
Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian co-directors of Two Days, One Night, capture the spirit of a modern day Dickens, but without the maudlin Victorianism. The Belgian natives stick to the lower class in their films using a documentarian hand-held camera; frequently using available light, unknown actors, eschewing soundtracks, tracking shots and big budgets, […]
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Mr. Holmes: When Logic Fails (PG)
From the beginning, Sherlock Holmes stories were as much about the interplay between logic and emotion as about ash-dust and ciphers. Holmes symbolizes the pinnacle of reason and remove, yet he comes to need the compassion and friendship of Watson. Mr. Holmes playfully snubs the Watson accounts as exaggerations, but the titular detective needs friendship […]