The new Showtime drama Yellowjackets is Lord of the Flies meets Lost meets Alive meets It meets the collected works of Megan Abbott. Many of its influences already overlap, and thus work together well. The ones that don’t can at times combine to create something that feels new and potent, …
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The movie’s called No Time to Die and has a runtime of two hours and 43 minutes. Someone, somewhere, is having a laugh. But not James Bond, who, for as long as Daniel Craig has been playing that iconic Ian Fleming creation (especially in the most recent films of his …
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Most episodes of HBO’s new limited series Scenes From a Marriage begin with an odd meta device, where we are watching stars Jessica Chastain or Oscar Isaac arriving on set, interacting with crew members who are wearing full Covid protective gear, studying dialogue and notes on their phones, and getting …
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“Minor Pixar” — a bit of a loaded phrase, right? The company that’s been responsible for giving animated movies several shoves up the evolutionary scale, and setting the bar for formal heights and emotional depth in ‘toon storytelling over the last quarter century, has created its share of masterpieces. (Pixar …
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First, history: In December 1968, almost exactly a year before the murder of Black Panther chairman Fred Hampton by the FBI, Paramount Pictures released what remains one of the most curious artifacts in the history of Hollywood — hardly a hotbed for radical views of black politics. It is a …
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There’s a lie at the heart of Rodd Rathjen’s Buoyancy, and that lie is freedom. It’s a fantasy spun by capital: that a boy might be free to leave his family, forego the confined and overdetermined life of an uncompensated worker living under the thumb of his father, to make …
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It’s been three decades between gigs for those Wyld Stallyns William “Bill” S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Theodore “Ted” Logan (Keanu Reeves). Was it worth the wait to once again see these two knuckleheads be excellent to each other? Totally, dudes. When Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure debuted in …
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Since Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite hit the jackpot at this year’s Oscars, all eyes are on South Korea as a new film mecca. That piles expectations on Peninsula, writer-director Yeon Sang-ho’s follow-up to 2016’s Train to Busan, his surprise smash about zombies who crash a ride on a bullet train where …
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In 2005, Andrew Fried met a group of young men who he’d seen perform a somewhat unclassifiable stage show. They took elements of Second City/UCB-style comedy, starting with gathering suggestions from the audience; scraps of paper with words were dropped into pails stationed at the front of the theater. Then …
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Graphic depictions of traumatic violence (eye-gouging with a spoon) and sexual depravity (don’t ask) had a good percentage of the audience sprinting for the exits when The Painted Bird premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year. Now available on demand, this WWII drama may have you running for cover …
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