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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker 2019
"A serial of serials, The Rise of Skywalker is a calamitously overstuffed series of exposition dumps, relentless incident and canon box-checking, like watching someone who’s on four hours of sleep and three Red Bulls try to do an immense task in as little time as possible so they can crash again—the movie is barreling through about three times as much information as it could reasonably bear." OK, we're done here.
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood 2019
"I know everyone is tired, anxious and could probably use a hug; nonetheless, with no venom against the late Mr. Rogers, his status as one of the closest things contemporary American culture has to an agreed-upon secular saint is a trifle bonkers, no?" More here, from TIFF.
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Synonyms 2019
"The press copy for Nadav Lapid’s third feature stresses its autobiographical ramifications: 'like his Synonyms protagonist, [Lapid] soon felt he had to leave Israel determined never to come back. Uprooting himself, he moved to Paris because of his self-professed admiration for Napoleon and a passion for soccer star Zidane and Godard movies.' Quite a package there, and Lapid’s stand-in Yoav (Tom Mercier) is consistent with that biographical sketch: one of the first things he does upon arriving to Paris is…
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Gemini Man 2019
Wrote about this here.
One thing I couldn't work in: there's a quick shot of Benedict Wong up at night, keeping watch with his pet toucan. Literally every other seemingly incidental detail in the script is inevitably a plant: Will Smith kills a bee and says he has an allergy to bees, which turns out to be a setup for...well, nevermind; Mary Elizabeth Winstead drinks a boilermaker, which prompts to Smith to note it's a cop drink and her to…
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Knives Out 2019
"A passion project Rian Johnson has been mentioning since at least 2010, Knives Out will presumably be a cornerstone of some future retrospective on movies made after fulfilling the imperative to successfully execute a blockbuster, alongside Ridley Scott’s The Counselor and Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry." More here. (This may gain half a star at some point.)
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The Laundromat 2019
"Soderbergh’s other Netflix movie this year, The Laundromat, turns out to be something of an anthology film, and thus by definition pretty uneven. The subject is off-shore shell accounts, specifically those administered by the firm Mossack Fonseca, as revealed in the 2015 leak of the Panama Papers. I despise The Big Short for all kinds of reasons but give Adam McKay grudging credit for not simplifying the mind-numbing particulars behind credit-default swaps and the other previously obscure financial instruments inadvertently…
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Life is Fare 2018
This one fell through the cracks a little bit and is a real treat. I profiled director/star Sephora Woldu here.
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 1962
There’s a brief shot of Ingrid Thulin coming out of Notre Dame. Whether this is Paris (where Four Horsemen was originally supposed to be filmed) or Hollywood (where it was mostly shot, when it turned out the locals were still understandably queasy about reenacting the occupation) is impossible to determine: there’s the doorway and wire fencing to the side, but no wider view to provide clues as to whether it’s soundstage or actuality. At frame left are three women, extras…
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Toy Story 4 2019
"Arriving a full 24 years after the first installment (long enough for CG water to finally be mastered; I’m impressed) Toy Story 4 improves on its misbegotten predecessor, an unceasingly loud affair that climaxed with weirdly intense imagery of the toys on a conveyor belt heading towards an incinerator. It made me think of the Holocaust, and I know I’m not the only person who had that reaction (although showing it to a group of children and pausing it at…