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It’s Time to Catch Up on the Rapture: “The Leftovers” Has Become One of TV’s Best Shows
The Leftovers airs Sundays on HBO If you don’t have religion, you should at least have The Leftovers. HBO’s rapturous drama hasn’t found much of an audience during its brief time on Earth, but those who listen to its sermon long enough tend to convert — nothing else on television seeks, so nakedly and unironically, […]
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The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki: The Least Overbearing Underdog Boxing Movie Ever?
Who is Olli Mäki, and why should you care about the happiest day of his life? These might not seem like urgent questions if you don’t possess a wealth of knowledge concerning Finnish boxers active in the early 1960s, but co-writer/director Juho Kuosmanen’s answers prove nuanced and endearing. A hit at Cannes (where it won […]
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“Finding Oscar” Digs Into a Heartbreaking Guatemalan Mystery
“Usually we’re looking to identify the dead, but here we’re looking for the living,” says a forensic anthropologist early in Finding Oscar, a documentary seeking to do just that. Looking back to Guatemala’s 1982 Dos Erres massacre, director Ryan Suffern focuses not on the nearly 250 villagers who were murdered by commandos working for the […]
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Dakota Fanning Compels as a Mute Midwife, but ‘Brimstone’ Won’t Leave You Speechless
Every Western that gets made feels like it could be the last one, and yet the genre refuses to ride off into the sunset. Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone doesn’t breathe new life into the oater, but the Dutch writer/director has clearly studied the gunslingers of yore. His film strives for a novelistic scope, with a nonlinear […]
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Sadly, Dolph Lundgren’s ‘Don’t Kill It’ Just Ain’t Killing It
Dolph Lundgren, who holds degrees in chemistry from universities on three different continents and once received a Fulbright scholarship to MIT, could probably spend his time doing whatever he wants as he nears his 60th birthday. That he continues to star in low-rent genre fare is charming in its way, but that doesn’t make movies […]
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As Taboo’s Finale Looms, a Celebration of Tom Hardy’s Mumbly, Mystical Powers
If you’ve grown weary of the Don Drapers and Walter Whites of the world, don’t expect James Keziah Delaney to make a strong first impression. Taboo‘s antihero, played with signature laconicism by Tom Hardy, is another difficult man for this golden age of TV — and, as fate would have it, gold is just one […]
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‘Le parc,’ One of This Winter’s Best New Movies, Premieres on MUBI
Like just about everyone else, MUBI has gotten into the distribution business — in a way. The streaming service, a favorite among cinephiles, has been offering a curated selection of arthouse titles for years: 30 movies at a time, each available for 30 days. Its new Discoveries platform, which seeks to highlight two recent offerings […]
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While Old People Were Complaining About Millennials, a 16-Year-Old Made the Pretty Good Crime Thriller ‘Stray Bullets’
“She’s a beauty,” sixteen-year-old Connor says to his friend Ash as they gaze upon the glory that is their newly purchased paintball gun. In his feature-length debut as a writer-director, actual sixteen-year-old Jack Fessenden (who also stars as Connor) captures that feeling, so familiar to kids but forgotten by adults, of mundane tasks being drawn […]
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‘Sleepless’ Makes Michelle Monaghan and Jamie Foxx Work All Night Against a Tired Script
Say this for Sleepless: It gives Michelle Monaghan more to do than almost anything else you’ve seen her in lately, whether it beTrue Detective or Patriots Day, and confirms once again that she should be in the lead far more often than Hollywood would have you believe. The positives don’t extend much further for Baran […]
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Good News: ‘Arsenal’ Features Some Top-Shelf Nicolas Cage! Bad News: He’s Not in It Enough.
The old truism about pizza — that even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good — also applies to Nicolas Cage movies. Well, most of the time: Arsenal, a low-rent crime thriller that finds the actor lurking in the background with evil intentions and a prosthetic nose that recalls Chris Farley in Dirty Work, treats […]