Netflix’s Spiderhead, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a movie about its own budget. It can afford a couple of big stars, so it has them — never mind whether the actors in question are an actual match for the material. The story plays out on a steely, vacuum-sealed set that …
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Hulu’s adaptation of Sally Rooney‘s Normal People was one of the very best TV shows of 2020 — an emotionally and sexually intimate knockout anchored by the fantastic performances of Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal. So expectations are naturally high for Hulu’s new Rooney adaptation, of her debut novel, Conversations …
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There is what you might call a “spoiler” in the title of Céline Sciamma’s new movie, a key to unlocking her look at childhood that’s hiding in plain sight. The French filmmaker’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire begins not with love, but with death: An eight-year-old named …
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When we last left Peter Parker, our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, he’d just watched footage of his battle in London with Quentin Beck, a.k.a. the charlatan savior Mysterio, being broadcast throughout the greater Manhattan area. Then J. Jonah Jameson, a man who never met a webslinger he didn’t want to string …
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Be my victim. For the many who’ve seen it over the years, 1992’s Candyman remains an unforgettable, almost unforgivably effective grievance: a film whose terrors are sticky, dense, pleasurably warying, and uncomfortable; whose politics feel knowing and rife with intention, just this side of didactic, yet poisoned at the root …
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They were called “video nasties” — those 1980s slasher flicks and splatter films filled with sexual violence, graphic depictions of murder and gallons of Caro syrup that, for a brief moment, were considered the root of all evil in Thatcher-era Britain. For years, some of the genre’s most extreme examples, …
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Robert Machoian’s debut feature, The Killing of Two Lovers, has a tough psychological knot braided right through its center, one that it doesn’t quite satisfyingly untangle — not that it exactly means to. The movie opens with a man named David (Clayne Crawford) standing over his sleeping wife, Nikki (Sepideh …
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In 2012, Matthew Teague found out that his wife, Nicole, was going to die. She’d been diagnosed with ovarian cancer; when the surgeon went in to remove tumors, however, he’d discovered that the disease had spread everywhere. Matthew was a journalist for The Atlantic. Nicole had been an actor when …
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It feels like some lost Italian masterpiece from the 1970s. unearthed from a locked vault after decades of gathering dust and slotted into the middle of a late De Sica/ mid-period Francesco Rosi triple feature. The score borrows bits of classical music, Sixties Euro-pop and Eighties Italo-disco — perfect for …
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In a cozy, seaside cottage in Kent, with the winds of WWII still at a distance, Alice Bloom (Gemma Arterton) bangs out academic theses about folklore on her typewriter and launches verbal attacks on neighbors who dare to interrupt her work. The locals have the swaggering, chainsmoking Alice pegged as …
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