Had to pick my heart up off the floor when I was leaving the theater, I was not expecting such a heartrending performance from Zac Efron.
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The Black Phone 2021
In terms of quality, this may be good for Blumhouse standards, but when considered apart from its contemporaries it is more or less the filmic equivalent of a drugstore horror novel. A little bit of pulp, a touch of violence, and a few mild scares combine for an expedient but not particularly affecting affair.
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Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood 2019
Unlike many of Tarantino's movies, Once Upon a Time does not entirely rely on the cheap thrills of watching people getting sliced open, beaten within an inch of their life, or otherwise horrifically maimed. Tarantino instead opts to spend much of this picture’s bloated runtime to idolize his Technicolor time period and characters, making this feel closer to a Paul Thomas Anderson film than anything else.
Our protagonists are Rick Dalton, a TV-Western star on the verge of being officially washed up,…
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House of Gucci 2021
I don’t know how it is possible for someone who has been making movies for as long as Ridley Scott to make something so bad on so many levels. The film simultaneously achieves an incredible level of campiness while attempting to maintain an air of self-importance, a dissonance that is amplified throughout by the childish silliness of Jared Leto's character versus the gravity of the other performances and plotpoints. If this was meant to be a meta critique of Oscar…
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The Apartment 1960
Watching a Billy Wilder movie gives one the feeling of rediscovering all over again just how great movies can be, and The Apartment is no exception to that rule; it’s as lovely and hopeful a film as was ever made.
Jack Lemmon plays C.C. Baxter, a people-pleasing bachelor, an eternal loser. He sits at his desk crunching numbers all day, living the lives of others as exercises in statistics. In an attempt to climb the corporate ladder, he loans out…
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Autumn Sonata 1978
I suppose the moral of the story here is that one should never be related to a concert pianist. In all seriousness though, Mr. Bergman is at his consummate best here. The compositions are immaculate; orange and brown, grey and miserable all over. The faces are pallid and the smiles forced. Charlotte and Eva’s memories are saturated in blissful selfish revisionism and isolated pain, respectively. Each character tries in their own pathetic ways to cover up lifetimes of hurt and alienation, but the brutality of the proceedings lay everything bare.
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Witness for the Prosecution 1957
Laughton steals the show as a cardiovascularly challenged lawyer in this serviceable Christie adaptation. Not Billy Wilder's best work, but even his subpar efforts are worth seeing.
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Peggy Sue Got Married 1986
There's a lot of schmaltz here, sometimes a little too much, but overall, Peggy Sue Got Married does a handy job of inviting the viewer to reminisce with it's protagonist and dream of what might have been, in both her life and perhaps in our own. It isn't The Godfather, but it is excellent comfort food, sweet and sticky and bathed in early-sixties nostalgia.
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The Stranger 1946
While The Stranger is a well-made and decently entertaining period noir, there’s definitely something missing, and that is, of course, the magic touch of Kane and Ambersons. While there’s nothing wrong with the movie per se, you can tell that studio politics kept Orson from fully flexing his Big Daddy movie muscles for all of us to appreciate; the best of what’s left is mostly thanks to Eddy G., but the rest of the cast does a nice job as well.
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The French Dispatch 2021
The French Dispatch lacks the character development and drama that make Wes Anderson’s best movies so relatable and touching. With the fragmented, magazine-style structure, Anderson is very clearly opting for technical experimentation over storytelling, which will naturally lead to a colder, more detached feel. The film focuses heavily on portraying fictional stories abstracted from a thousand previous abstractions, which, when coupled with the already elitist crew of writers, critics, and bourgeois college “revolutionaries,” gives the film a certain post-modern aloofness…
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Saving Private Ryan 1998
If Spielberg’s script was half as thorough as his stunts this would be a pretty good movie.
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