Money Heist: Korea – Joint Economic Area is a mostly faithful adaptation of Álex Pina’s crime drama La Casa de Papel — you may know it as Money Heist, which aired from 2017 to 2021 and went from semi-successful Spanish TV series to global Netflix phenomenon. Once again, a bespectacled …
Read More »'Happening' Is an Award-Winning French Drama About Abortion. It's Also the Most Urgent Movie of 2022
“Can you help me?” It’s the first sentence you hear in Happening, filmmaker Audrey Diwan’s loose adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s semi-memoir–ish novel, and given that the opening credits are still rolling over a black background, it’s hard to say who’s asking whom for what. But it’s definitely a female voice, …
Read More »'Tiny Tim: King for a Day' Gives the 1960s Musical Eccentric the Royal Treatment
No matter the topic, the finest docs make you realize how much we needed a film on a particular subject. And that rule couldn’t apply more to Tiny Tim: King for a Day, director Johan von Sydow’s overview of the otherworldly life and times of one of the most WTF …
Read More »'Fargo' Heads South for the Winter
“You know why America loves a crime story? Because America is a crime story,” mob boss Josto Fadda (Jason Schwartzman) argues in the fourth season of Fargo. We are a nation built on stolen land, with the labor of stolen people. And perhaps because of this, as Josto notes, we …
Read More »'The Lovebirds' Review: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Issa Rae and Kumail Nanjiani generate big laughs and a sense of genuine connection as a New Orleans couple on the skids who find out what they really mean to each other when a bunch of psychos try to kill them. Why? Screenwriters Aaron Abrams and Brendan Gall strain hard …
Read More »'Bull' Review: A Broken Rider, a Lost Teen and an Unlikely Friendship
There are the screen actors that most folks have recognized, and deservedly canonized, as the profession’s top-tier — your Streeps and De Niros, your Brandos and Blanchetts, your Hoffmans (both Dustin and Philip Seymour). And then there are the great actors who toil away from the brighter spotlights but still …
Read More »The Perfect-Life Facade Crumbles Fantastically in 'Bad Education'
Truth trumps fiction once again in Bad Education, Cory Finley’s whipsmart and wickedly fascinating take on a 2002 scandal about trusted educators who embezzled more than $11 million from the public-school system in Long Island, New York. A stellar Hugh Jackman, like you’ve never seen him (or Wolverine) before, tackles …
Read More »'Endings, Beginnings': All the Love, Sex, Secrets, and Shailene You Desire
Filmmaker Drake Doremus is making himself a specialist in love-hate relationships, a kind of cinema couples therapist in such films as Like Crazy, Breathe In, Equals, and Newness. With his latest film — Endings, Beginnings — Doremus breaks from the couples path to home in on one character. Her name …
Read More »'The Rhythm Section' Review: Assassin Flick Can't Find the Beat
Before it leaps off the cliff of cliché into the valley of banality, The Rhythm Section gets in a few good licks. Stephanie Patrick, the wannabe assassin played by Blake Lively, is sure as hell not cut out for the job. She scares easy, fumbles with guns, and can’t fight …
Read More »Shia LaBeouf Exorcizes His Family Demons in 'Honey Boy'
Shia LaBeouf — in a live-wire performance that jumps off the screen — plays a version of his own loose-cannon father in Honey Boy, leaving Noah Jupe and Lucas Hedges to portray two stages of the artist as a young man, at 12 and 22 respectively. The names have been …
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