In Theaters
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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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Wonder Woman (PG-13)
In the Pensées, Pascal writes, “I blame equally those who decide to praise man [and] those who blame him… I can only approve those who search in anguish.” Pascal’s anguish stems from man’s contradictory nature: caught inescapably between the extremes of wretchedness and greatness, he is neither wretched enough to be a beast nor great […]
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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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Doctor Strange (PG-13)
Scott Derrickson’s Doctor Strange is the latest installment in the rapidly expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe, a collection of interconnected superhero movies that, to many viewers, are starting to feel like indistinguishable products. Doctor Strange sidesteps and invites that complaint in interesting ways. The broad strokes of the story here are par for the course, with […]
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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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Hail, Caesar!: Hollywood Meets the Inferno (PG-13)
The religious who live outside the film industry tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of secular materialism. In their view, directors and starlets throw lavish parties and cruise down Rodeo Drive in search of the next designer purse. Certainly Hollywood has its share of hedonism. However, it is also a deeply spiritual place. […]
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Hail, Caesar! A Tale of The Christ (PG-13)
Early in Hail, Caesar!, the latest film from Joel and Ethan Coen, protagonist Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) speaks to a room full of religious figures: a Protestant preacher, a Catholic priest, an Orthodox clergyman, and a Jewish rabbi. Mannix, a fixer for the fictional Capitol Pictures studio, explains that their biggest release of the year […]
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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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Spectre (PG-13)
“My name is Lester Burnham,” intones the protagonist of Sam Mendes’ debut film, American Beauty. “This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This is my life. I am 42 years old. In less than a year, I will be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet, and in a way, I’m dead already.” […]
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Drunk gods: Victor Frankenstein (PG-13)
When I remembered that Igor was never a character in the original Frankenstein story, I began to expect less of Victor Frankenstein, which makes Igor its main character. When I discovered that this version’s Frankenstein lives in a steampunk London, my expectations lowered yet more. They would descend much lower still. This is a shame, […]
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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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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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The Man From U.N.C.L.E., or, “The Anti-Kingsman” (PG-13)
In his essay, “Kingsman and the Maybe Genius of Non-Winking Satire,” Hulk Film Crit makes the rather bold assertion that Matthew Vaughn is a kind of blockbuster Martin Scorsese. As different as their methods may be, Hulk argues that their intentions are deeply similar: both approach ugly subjects with a brutal honesty that acknowledges the allure […]
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The Fantastic Four: It’s Not Getting Better (PG-13)
When I went to see The Fantastic Four, I was expecting what I usually expect from adaptations of Marvel comics: I didn’t think that it would be particularly memorable, but neither did I expect it to be particularly bad. I was wrong on both accounts: It was memorably bad. I understand that I was probably […]