Category: Travis
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Review: ‘Enola Holmes’
Millie Bobby Brown Cracks Cases And Wins Hearts As Sherlock Holmes’ Fearless Sister
Sherlock Holmes has been re-envisioned in dozens of different ways. One of the enduring features of the character is that he can be changed, whether into an action hero like in the Johnny Depp films, or as a kid like in Young Sherlock Holmes, or into a contemporary investigator as in Elementary. But none have…
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Review: ‘Antebellum’
Janelle Monae Fights For Her Freedom In A Psychological Horror In Need Of Tighter Focus
Antebellum is not the movie you think it is. Antebellum is not the movie that it has been promoted to be. That is not a bad thing, just statements of fact about a film that has surprises heaped atop a narrative that explores the lasting impact of slavery on black people in the present, the…
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Review: ‘The Nest’
Jude Law And Carrie Coon’s World Crumbles In Sean Durkin’s Chilling Family Drama
*NOTE: This is a reprint of my review from the Sundance Film Festival.* The opening moments of Sean Durkin’s devastatingly precise family drama The Nest are shot almost like a horror movie. Cinematographer Mátyás Erdély (Son of Saul) frames the exterior of the O’Hara’s suburban home like we’re expecting Jason Voorhees to come stalking out of the bushes.…
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Review: ‘Lost Girls & Love Hotels’
Alexandra Daddario Goes Fifty Shades In A Japanese Drama That Is Lost In Translation
In the opening moments of William Olsson’s Lost Girls & Love Hotels, American ex-pat Margaret (a game Alexandra Daddario) staggers through the back alleys of Tokyo. Lost in the darkness, she eventually finds what she needs; a strange man who will abscond with her to one of the city’s infamous “love hotels” for a night…
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Review: ‘The Secrets We Keep’
Noomi Rapace And Joel Kinnaman Lead A Thoughtful, Uneven Thriller About The Cost Of Retribution
Perhaps no actor better embodies a woman’s vengeful thirst against violent, misogynistic men than Noomi Rapace, who has gravitated to such roles ever since she was Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In Yuval Adler’s The Secrets We Keep, she finds herself on familiar ground, yet in an unfamiliar setting, that of…
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Review: ‘The Devil All The Time’
A Star-Studded Cast Fails To Energize Antonio Campos’ Passionless Look At Sin, Redemption, And Corrupted Faith
It should be an easy home run. Antonio Campos’ starry, swampy Southern gothic The Devil All the Time has so many tools the indie, used to smaller-scale explorations of filmmaker is unsure how to deploy them. Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Riley Keough, Eliza Scanlen, Mia Wasikowska, Bill Skarsgård, Tom Holland, Haley Bennett, Jason Clarke, Sebastian…
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Review: ‘The Broken Hearts Gallery’
Geraldine Viswanathan And Dacre Montgomery Find Humor After Heartbreak
The Broken Hearts Gallery isn’t a movie that would normally blink too hard on my radar, but there’s one reason it did and one reason why it’s pretty great. Star Geraldine Viswanathan is tremendous in a plucky, vulnerable, expressive role as Lucy, a young woman who does what a lot of us do when we…
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Review: ‘Mulan’
Disney’s Sweeping Wuxia Fairy Tale Is Their Best Remake Yet
Disney’s long-anticipated, longer-than-expected anyway, remake of Mulan opens with a sweeping, grande journey through an ancient Chinese village. Such a vast introduction was clearly meant to be experienced on the big screen, and surely, director Niki Caro would’ve liked to see her beautiful, heroic live-action epic in theaters. In March, when the movie first premiered…
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Review: ‘I’m Thinking Of Ending Things’
Charlie Kaufman’s Weird, Beautiful, Funny Examination Of Love And Loneliness
Nothing is ever as it seems in a Charlie Kaufman movie. That’s a simple disclaimer that could apply to just about film, but it’s especially true for Kaufman whose characters are many things all at once, and sometimes nothing at all. In 2004 Kaufman won a screenplay Oscar for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,…
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Review: ‘Tenet’
Christopher Nolan’s Anticipated Spy Film Is A Diabolical And Confounding Spectacle
If it feels like most of 2020 has been about the when, where, and why of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, you aren’t far off. After numerous delays caused by the global bastard, questions about whether the movie should be released at all at such a time, and then heaped with undue expectations of saving the entire theatrical…