Film Reviews

Latest Reviews

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  Sisterhood is Powerful — and Pugnacious — in Girls Trip

  Melissa Anderson | July 17 at 10 p.m.

  Truth in advertising: Girls trip hard during their New Orleans getaway in Girls Trip, which maybe doesn’t need that possessive apostrophe after all. Malcolm D. Lee’s comedy, written by Kenya Barris and Tracy Oliver — the same creative team behind...

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  Visually, Valerian Is Beyond Dazzling — Just Don't Think About Story or Character

  Bilge Ebiri | July 17 at 3:05 p.m.

  It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue...

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  True-crime Doc Santoalla Captures the Feud Between the Only Two Families at the World’s End

  Alan Scherstuhl | July 17 at 11 p.m.

  Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer’s quiet, immersive true-crime mystery doc opens with video more terrifying than fictionalized “found footage” horror ever manages: A man is walking through the rubble and ruin of the abandoned village of Santoalla,...

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  Jenny Slate Dazzles in Landline, a ’90s-set Comedy About Growing Up Disappointed

  Alan Scherstuhl | July 17 at 8 p.m.

  Jenny Slate’s laughter comes out in a wild gush, as though she’s been shaken and uncorked, the sound somehow puppyishly sweet and punkishly impolite. Her characters, cheery cynics, often fail to quite match the mood of a room, so their amused...

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  Dunkirk Is the Movie Christopher Nolan Was Born to Make

  Bilge Ebiri | July 17 at 2:02 p.m.

  The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World...

• Amat Escalante’s The Untamed Finds the Humanity in Hooking Up With Alien Sex Beasts

  April Wolfe | July 17 at 9 p.m.

  At a crater in the lush, mossy-green Mexican countryside in Amat Escalante’s fourth feature, The Untamed, every native species of animal gathers to fuck, like a pornographic Noah’s Ark. This scene of otherworldly magical realism is not what...

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  Battle Scars

  Craig D. Lindsey | July 14 at 12 a.m.

  I'm sure there's a thoughtful way to make a movie about a war veteran who loses his genitals during combat. Unfortunately, Battle Scars doesn't find it -- mainly because the movie doesn't have one original, sensible thought. It's all about...