The title of Kirsten Johnson’s extraordinary new documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, is not a true statement — yet. Dick Johnson, the filmmaker’s beloved father, is not dead. Still, this oddly poignant and sneakily provocative movie, which is now streaming on Netflix, shows him dying any number of ways, twice, …
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You could argue that Tenet, the brain-teasing new blockbuster-to-be from agent provocateur Christopher Nolan, doesn’t know whether it’s coming or going. Actually it’s doing both — and the director-screenwriter is challenging us to try and keep up. It’s as if an African-American James Bond, in the person of the sharply …
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This review originally ran in January as part of our Sundance Film Festival 2020 coverage. Even if you’ve seen the footage before, in L.A. punk docs and VH-1 specials, it’s still thrilling to watch: Five women on stage, their outfits resembling a day-glo mix of thrift-store chic and a temper …
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Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) awakes with a start. She walks through her new house, filled with unpacked boxes and half-wallpapered walls. She puts on classical music, shops online for cremation urns and crawls across her living room floor. Something is clearly not right. When her friend Jane (Jane Adams), a …
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The stumbling block for political satire is that it’s almost always partisan — which is great if it flatters your views, and grating if it doesn’t. But not for Jon Stewart. In his first writing-directing gig since 2014’s docudrama Rosewater, the former late-night fixture ingeniously makes it impossible to take …
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A Texas mother pushes her reluctant teen daughter to follow in her footsteps as a beauty queen. Yes, we’ve seen so many versions of this story before — but luckily, the Miss Juneteenth competition is no typical beauty pageant. It commemorates the day in 1865, some two years after the …
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A woman wakes up in a rowboat. She’s in the middle of a lake. She has no idea how she got there. Worse, she has no idea who she is. This is a hell of a starting point — the possibilities seem virtually limitless for the kinds of stories you …
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“Alien, but on a ship in the high seas” — for some folks, that description alone is enough to have them rolling their eyes and ready to dismiss a project for being too formulaic, too reductive. For others, it’s the perfect logline to get them salivating, Pavlovian-doggy style. (Remember, Ridley …
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Midway through Dare Me, a new USA drama set in the world of high school cheerleading, we see local cheer coach Colette French (Willa Fitzgerald) watching the classic Forties film noir Double Indemnity, based on the novel by James M. Cain. The scene is less interested in revealing something about …
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It’s been 10 years since the original, but Zombieland seems like yesterday to the returning cast: Woody Harrelson as the redneck warrior Tallahassee; Jesse Eisenberg as the nerdy Columbus; Emma Stone as seen-it-all Wichita; and Abigail Breslin as Little Rock, her little sister. In case you forgot, they’re all named …
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