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Heretic
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Although it is unashamedly a genre piece, Heretic is not only an expertly engineered work of suspense but also an ingeniously structured colloquy about the most deeply held belief systems.
Posted Nov 08, 2024
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The Piano Lesson
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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John David Washington burrows into Boy Willie’s burn-it-all down rage, but even better is Ms. Deadwyler, who gives a fulsome, heart-rending performance as his sister.
Posted Nov 08, 2024
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Bird
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of “Bird” don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.
Posted Nov 08, 2024
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Juror #2
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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These elements carry the potential for a smart courtroom thriller with a cynical edge. But Jonathan Abrams’s script is so amateurish it feels like a first draft.
Posted Nov 02, 2024
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Here
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Mr. Zemeckis, who in “Gump” made perhaps the quintessential Boomer picture, is stuck in a mode of storytelling meant to appeal to a previous generation: He delivers his narrative beats in the most cloying, insufferable, overdetermined way.
Posted Nov 02, 2024
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Blitz
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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The parallel with Oliver Twist is not just overwhelming, it’s almost plagiarism. It’s also close to being unintentionally funny, as though Mr. McQueen is about to order the cast to break into “Consider Yourself” from “Oliver!”
Posted Nov 02, 2024
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Soundtrack to a Coup d'État
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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The film, with its dazzling musical energy, its complex narrative sweep and its dizzying cast of characters, finally emerges as a tragedy: a story of promises broken and trust betrayed.
Posted Nov 02, 2024
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A Real Pain
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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It's thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it's billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.
Posted Nov 02, 2024
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Dahomey
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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At a time when many documentaries stretch into episode after episode, there’s something refreshing about one that doesn’t aspire to be all-encompassing... Dahomey is at once haunting and humble.
Posted Oct 30, 2024
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Conclave
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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None of it rings true; those who seek a serious dramatic inquiry into the inner workings of the church should look elsewhere.
Posted Oct 30, 2024
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Memoir of a Snail
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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The humility is central to the appeal of this deeply felt feature, easily one of the best films in a year that has been the cinematic analogue of Grace and Gilbert’s childhood.
Posted Oct 30, 2024
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Anora
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Though Anora frequently sparkles, it’s also inconsistent, so it falls short of becoming a classic of its genre. Still, thanks to its appealingly youthful energy and its earthy performances, it’s one of the spiciest comedies of the year.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
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Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
(2023)
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Kyle Smith
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Caligula is still far from great, but it has risen to the level of an enjoyable, intermittently campy soap about ruthlessness, with one or two affecting moments.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
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Exhibiting Forgiveness
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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The movie isn’t wanting for dramatic juice. It simply never comes together with the sort of gathering force that we witness in its own scenes of artistic creation.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
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Woman of the Hour
(2023)
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John Anderson
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Woman of the Hour may be sensational, in the tabloid sense, but it is angry, too, and full of questions.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
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Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara
(2024)
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John Anderson
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The storytelling is first-rate, snowballing along from one outrage to the next.
Posted Oct 17, 2024
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The Room Next Door
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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It’s a lovely, haunting work from a filmmaker decades into a singular career and clearly feeling ever more conscious of his own mortality.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Oh Canada
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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The movie is variously bewildering, awkward and truly moving, turning on a bitterly unsentimental performance from Mr. Gere.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Miséricorde
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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Though toward the end of its 104 minutes the movie begins to feel too busily plotted, it concludes on a note that is perfectly and pitilessly perverse.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Emilia Pérez
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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If Sergio Leone were alive and making musicals, he might have engineered something this grand and sweeping.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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The Brutalist
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Similar in tone to such Paul Thomas Anderson films as There Will Be Blood and The Master, Mr. Corbet’s often-staggering movie casts an unsentimental look at the price of greatness.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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All We Imagine as Light
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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It’s a visually and sociologically rich portrait of a city that also manages to achieve an affecting -- dare I say novelistic -- depth of character.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Afternoons of Solitude
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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Rarely have I seen a film that has combined the riveting and the repellent to such memorably strange effect.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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We Live in Time
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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The makers of We Live in Time attempt something a little less Hollywood... A mawkish core remains, though, and the resulting disjuncture—between the film’s indie style and its sludgy sentimentality -- makes the whole effort feel phony.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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The Last of the Sea Women
(2024)
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John Anderson
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The Last of the Sea Women is, like its subjects, beautiful and charming; the underwater cinematography by Justin Turkowski is modestly spectacular.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Piece By Piece
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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In a season of unconventional musicals, Piece by Piece is the most infectious one -- a party for the eyes and ears. It’s too bad the seats in the movie theaters may constrain people from getting up and dancing.
Posted Oct 11, 2024
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Joker: Folie à Deux
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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The falloff in quality from "Joker," a genuinely searing innovation in comic-book movies, to this one is so steep that it’s comparable to the dropoff between “The Hangover” and “The Hangover Part II.”
Posted Oct 10, 2024
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White Bird
(2023)
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Kyle Smith
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Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.
Posted Oct 03, 2024
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Intercepted
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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In little more than an hour and a half, it provides an education into the experience of the continuing atrocity with which only the most detailed journalistic accounts can compete.
Posted Oct 03, 2024
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Salem's Lot
(2024)
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John Anderson
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Salem’s Lot in this new incarnation resorts to being funny when it oughtn’t, gruesome when it isn’t required, and there is an awkward sense of not knowing quite where to run along the rocky shores of Maine.
Posted Oct 02, 2024
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Apartment 7A
(2024)
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John Anderson
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Apartment 7A isn’t called “Son of Rosemary’s Baby.” Its Broadway-musical backstory doesn’t set one up at all for what is to come. And it is a highly stylish effort at recycling. Or pre-cycling.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
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Megalopolis
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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How Mr. Coppola spent $120 million on this Calamitus Maximus is baffling. The chosen look is intentionally gaudy to signify moral rot, but the ugliness becomes overwhelming.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
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Lee
(2023)
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Kyle Smith
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“Lee” enables Ms. Winslet (who is one of its producers) to burrow into the kind of unglamorous character she loves, but it has the feel of a pet project made to seek awards for her rather than to say anything much.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
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The Wild Robot
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.
Posted Sep 26, 2024
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Who’s Afraid of Nathan Law?
(2023)
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John Anderson
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It is impossible not to admire the heroism it captures. Or to increase one’s fear of Beijing as a regime that is irrational at best, sociopathic at worst.
Posted Sep 20, 2024
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Wolfs
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Mr. Watts, who did such a charming job with his “Home” movies, has come up with a comedy that is relentlessly silly without ever being funny, loaded with incident yet headed nowhere.
Posted Sep 20, 2024
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Uglies
(2024)
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John Anderson
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It feels a bit infantile, never mind petty, to go looking for literary-theological heft in a project so clearly directed at the blushingly young, or to begrudge them an indulgence like Uglies.
Posted Sep 19, 2024
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The Substance
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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It’s all in service of obvious ideas about the intertwined pressures of sexism and the spotlight, themes too little developed to sustain the nightmarish, queasily satirical fantasia splashed and spattered atop them.
Posted Sep 19, 2024
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Never Let Go
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Mr. Aja makes the most of an uninspired script. In this type of film, however, everything depends on the third-act resolution. It doesn’t deliver.
Posted Sep 19, 2024
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My Old Ass
(2024)
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Zachary Barnes
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My Old Ass ends up moving from tepid comedy to utterly synthetic Nicholas Sparks-style emotionalism, all in about 90 minutes that -- appropriately enough for this time-twisting mediocrity -- seem to stretch on for years.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
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The Critic
(2023)
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Kyle Smith
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Mr. McKellen deserved a more accomplished script, and so does the audience.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
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Speak No Evil
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Self-doubt can be unnerving, and provides an excellent foundation for a scary movie.
Posted Sep 12, 2024
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His Three Daughters
(2023)
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Zachary Barnes
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One gradually senses a certain art to the screenplay's artifice, with overwhelming feeling expressed through the writerly surface under which it roils and surges.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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The End
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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The premise is hamfisted, but the songs are even worse.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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Better Man
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Despite a couple of cute song-and-dance numbers, its conceit can’t cover for the deficiencies of a script that indulges all known showbiz clichés.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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Maria
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Ms. Jolie is fantastically regal as La Callas contemplates a comeback in her palatial Paris apartment in the 1970s, but her vamping, and a surfeit of languid lounging, makes it seem like a humorless retread of Sunset Boulevard.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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The Apprentice
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Both actors, especially Mr. Strong, are gripping in a coming-of-age story that portrays the younger Trump somewhat sympathetically, though he loses his soul as he learns to imitate Cohn’s tactics.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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Mr. Burton’s finest films appear to be behind him, but at his best he can still deliver dazzling madness.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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Saturday Night
(2024)
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Kyle Smith
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The pained interactions between Michaels and Shuster quickly get repetitive. There are so many great moments, however, that the overall effect is to leave the audience in a dazed appreciation for the show, for show business, and for the art of comedy.
Posted Sep 05, 2024
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Merchant Ivory
(2023)
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Zachary Barnes
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"Merchant Ivory” will almost certainly put you in the mood for a Merchant-Ivory movie, which might turn out to be even better than you remembered -- a period piece that, for all its trappings of the past, couldn’t feel less remote.
Posted Aug 29, 2024
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