Train Dreams tells an ambling, pensive and melancholy story through beautifully lived-in performances and stunning natural photography. The movie evokes our sympathy and compassion for everyone left puzzled by life’s inscrutability. Highly Recommended.
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When the world is on fire, thank goodness there’s art to temporarily remind us of the beauty of life. This is the heart of The Choral, a WW1 period piece that evokes universal truths about art and the horrors of war. Ralph Fiennes delivers another memorable performance as the arrogant conductor tasked with the impossible. Recommended.
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Roofman is a heartfelt movie that entertains the old fashioned way, with interesting characters and winning performances. Channing Tatum and Kristen Dunst are engaging in the leading roles, and Tatum’s performance represents a career best. It’s movie magic rendered at human scale. Recommended.
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A lonely OB-GYN in a rural Georgian hospital faces allegations of malpractice in Kulumbegashvili’s brutally slow-paced, if quietly devastating, sophomore feature—a Haneke-esque moral inquiry marked by hypnotic long takes and sublime use of film language.
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A provincial man who’s trying to find a job stays with his city cousin in Ceylan’s masterful third feature that probes issues of personal stasis and social alienation in contemporary Turkish society, marked by restrained performances that accrue a quiet emotional depth.
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Catalan filmmaker Carla Simon made her name with the tiny, plotless, yet moving family dramas Summer 1993 and Alcarras. Now, with Romeria, she expands her ambitions into a magical realist mystery but, sadly, the leap has not been made gracefully. A few strikingly beautiful moments aside, Romeria is a frustratingly dull and repetitive film, taking […]
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Rohmer’s provocative final entry from his ‘Six Moral Tales’ calls attention to the temptation of extramarital affairs, as a man in a happy marriage contemplates putting his immoral theoretical thoughts into practice.
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Father Mother Sister Brother belongs to a sizeable subsection of Jim Jarmusch’s oeuvre: works that exist somewhere between feature-length films and compilations of short films. It consists of three roughly forty-minute vignettes, each of which traces the late stage in a family dynamic where there’s not much more to say, or that can be said. […]
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In adapting Wuthering Heights, Emerald Fennell has been faced with a bit of a conundrum. On the other hand this is clearly a novel that is enormously significant to her, both personally and artistically. On the other hand, it’s a novel that challenges her taste for extremity and transgression, since it’s already one of the […]
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From stylized dresses to clingy egos, The Devil Wears Prada 2 pours like an expensive bottle of champagne full of delights.
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The story of pop superstar Michael Jackson — from his extraordinary early days in the Jackson 5 to the visionary artist whose creative ambition fuels a relentless pursuit to become the biggest entertainer in the world.
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“Funny how secrets travel…” The title page on a draft of the Lost Highway screenplay reads: “A 21st Century Horror Noir. A Graphic Investigation Into Parallel Identity Crises. A World Where Time Is Dangerously Out Of Control. A Terrifying Ride Down The Lost Highway.” When I saw Lost Highway for the first time in my […]
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A story told backwards in three distinct acts as we begin with the end of the world and find our way through the life of one man that can perhaps explain how it is we got here… (Really telling on myself as a Stephen King fan with my year-end Top Ten List, but I must […]
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Directed by: Jay Roach Written by: Tony McNamara Starring: Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Sunita Mani Rating: [4/5] Of the many tenets of marriage, sacrifice and selflessness comes as part of the arrangement. Instead of focusing on what works best for one individual, it widens to include another person and major decisions must meet the […]
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“Silencio.” Los Angeles, Hollywood California, the City of Angels, whatever you want to call it is an interesting place. The great filmmaker David Lynch (RIP) had this to say about Hollywood: “I love Hollywood. I love the dream of it.” He also said that: “When you’re there in LA, on some nights… you can feel […]
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This is not the film that future me will select to wait out the winter. Against the Ice is a cold, bitter, faithless test of patience and fortitude – and that’s just for the characters. Watching it is something like passing a shivering chihuahua on a bitterly frosty day and wondering if the little guy […]
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For my fifth film of the London Film Festival, I decided to go down the American independent movie route. Looking at the schedule, the general plot of Train Dreams stood out to me as something that could be interesting, but what clinched it as a film that I would watch at the festival is the […]
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“A dream is never just a dream.” In an enlightening article published a week before Christmas 2025, New York Magazine writer Lane Brown states that, “Stanley Kubrick’s movies have a habit of aging into new meanings, like monoliths that take time for us apes to figure out.” The enigmatic, maximalist director (2001, Dr. Strangelove, Clockwork […]
Continue reading “Eyes Wide Shut: 25 Years Later, Kubrick Shows Us the Christmas We Deserve”
