Early in The Great, Hulu‘s new satire about the younger years of Russian empress Catherine the Great, her husband, Peter III, insists, “People underestimate the joy in suffering.” The Great for the most part finds Peter to be an utter buffoon of a failson, but it agrees with him on …
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Annette Bening lets it rip as Grace, a bile-spewing wife who keeps coming so hard at her reserved husband Edward (Bill Nighy) that she’s practically daring him to leave her. When, after 29 years, he finally gets up the nerve to do just that, all hell breaks loose. Edward and …
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“Nothing You Are About to See Is True.” Those are the words that teasingly introduce True History of the Kelly Gang, the dazzling and defiantly rogue western from director Justin Kurzel that plays with facts to get at a deeper truth about Ned Kelly. This we know is true about …
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It’s not a bad idea in these dark days to provide sheltering audiences with a light-hearted romp. What a shame then that the soufflé writer-director Dean Craig labors to construct in Love Wedding Repeat sinks early on and never recovers. Instead of a fresh take on Four Weddings and a …
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For 50-plus years, British filmmaker Ken Loach has been a crusading white knight for the working class. His heroes are laborers, carpenters, union organizers, social workers, immigrant house cleaners, pub-dwelling punters, football-fanatic postmen. Kids, whether it’s the falconry-obsessed lad of Kes (1969) or the drug-dealing teen of Sweet Sixteen (2002), …
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When the TV landscape was much smaller and lily-white, any series that centered on minorities had to shoulder an unfair burden of representing that entire group. Margaret Cho’s short-lived Nineties series All-American Girl couldn’t just be a goofy family sitcom, because it was also the very first one about an …
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A very strange and welcome thing has happened this TV season: The broadcast networks are trying again. You remember the broadcast networks, don’t you? They were mighty beasts that once dominated the earth, with impressive names like National Broadcasting Company or Columbia Broadcasting System (NBC or CBS to their friends). …
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Acclaimed filmmaker Terrence Malick does something he hasn’t done in years with his new film A Hidden Life — he attempts to tell an actual, old-fashioned story. This may come as good news to those who once celebrated his mastery in such early films as Badlands and Days of Heaven, …
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It’s always a downer when talented artists pour everything they’ve got into a film that stubbornly refuses to come to life. That’s the case with Lucy in the Sky, an astronaut drama from a female perspective that argues space travel can seriously screw with your perceptions of life on earth. …
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How fitting that Antonio Banderas, 59, is delivering the performance of his career in a movie loosely based on the life of the director who gave him his breakthrough role in 1982’s Labyrinth of Passion. In Pain and Glory, the 21st movie for the 69-year-old Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, the …
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