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August 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP
Saturday, September 2, 2017 at 6 p.m.

TriStar Pictures
Terminator 2: Judgment Day: In 1991, when James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day came out, the Iron Curtain had recently fallen, effectively ending the Cold War and seemingly lifting the nuclear threat. I distinctly remember Sarah Connor’s ruminations on the fate of the human race eliciting chuckles in my theater at the time. Today, however, as T2 arrives again in theaters, converted to 3-D, its overwhelming despair is impossible to ignore. This is one of the most upsetting blockbusters ever.
Read our review here.
If you prefer our Reviews For The Easily Distracted, check it out here. 1/13
Read our review here.
If you prefer our Reviews For The Easily Distracted, check it out here. 1/13

Sony Pictures
Close Encounters of the Third Kind: In one sense, Steven Spielberg's 1977 UFO bliss-out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is reprehensible. It is, after all, the story of a daydreamer dad (Richard Dreyfuss) who leaves his family for worlds unknown as he continually trades in one slender, luminous life companion for another: Teri Garr for Melinda Dillon for the glowing sprites disgorged from the grandest spaceship in cinema history. In another sense, that narrative proves deeply revealing of the film's creator and its era. The leave-it-all-behind ethos of Close Encounters extends beyond the go-nowhere clutter and clamor of the downwardly mobile suburban life of Dreyfuss' Roy Neary.
Read our review here. 2/13
Read our review here. 2/13

Courtsey of Neon
Beach Rats: In the outer stretches of Brooklyn, where city streets meet the sea, 19-year-old Frankie sits hunched over in the dark in his parents’ basement, cruising for older men on the internet. The brim of his hat barely lets us see his eyes. He’s not furiously masturbating or drooling over the hot bods on this site; he’s hiding. When one man asks him to meet in person, he responds, "I don’t do that sort of thing."
Read our review here. 3/13
Read our review here. 3/13

4 Palm Pictures
Memories of Murder: Moving from atmospheric mystery to political allegory, with pit stops into slapstick comedy along the way, Bong Joon-ho's second film remains impossible to categorize. Newly restored and re-released, the director's breakthrough feature (he would go on to direct The Host, Snowpiercer and this year's Okja, among other films) has lost none of its power to unsettle, and today it feels even stranger than ever.
Read our review here. 4/13
Read our review here. 4/13

Netflix
Icarus: Give Putin this: The man knows how to deny the elaborate, outrageous conspiracies with which his government violates international laws and norms. To this day, despite the 37 medals that have been stripped from his nation's Olympians, Putin insists that Russia never engaged in a long-running campaign of feeding its athletes performance-enhancing drugs and then faking samples for drug tests. Putin and his subordinates have sometimes placed blame for it all on one man, Grigory Rodchenkov, the scientist who served as the director of Moscow's (official) Anti-Doping Center — and also as the director of a program whose mission was precisely the opposite of what is suggested by that institution's name. The story opens with director Brian Fogel, a competitive amateur cyclist, shaken by the revelations that Lance Armstrong had managed to dope and long avoid detection. Fogel concocts the kind of elaborate scheme that crowd-pleasing docs get built on: He'd prove that the system to test athletes was "bullshit" by doping himself — and then beating the tests. His search for a scientist who will assist him leads to the cheerily corrupt Rodchenkov, who proves eager to spill on camera the ins and outs of his Moscow lab's WADA-beating trickery. But then news breaks of Moscow's state-sponsored doping. Fearing for his life, Rodchenkov flees Russia with the help of his new friend, Fogel. As Fogel interviews Rodchenkov about all the man knows, Icarus becomes something like an amateur Citizenfour. The Russians, of course, endeavor to discredit Rodchenkov, but their lies — practically "Fake news!" — are shredded by the footage that Fogel collected back when this was all a prank.
Read our review here. 5/13
Read our review here. 5/13

Autumn Lin Photography
Whose Streets?: In stirring interviews and horrific footage of police gassing protesters, the new Ferguson doc Whose Streets? booms out a truth you know already no matter who you are: Black people die because white cops fear them. Even the grand jury that failed to find cause to indict officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Ferguson teen Michael Brown in 2014 knows this: They decided, like so many other juries, that a killer cop had reason to believe that he was acting in self-defense. Fear of blackness gives the killers both motive and exculpation.
Read our review here. 6/13
Read our review here. 6/13

Courtesy of Wild Bunch
Nocturama: Often populated with voluptuaries, the films of Bertrand Bonello unerringly distill mood and milieu. In the dread-drenched, bifurcated and bold Nocturama, the French filmmaker's seventh narrative feature, recounts roughly 14 hours — from about 2 p.m. to 4 a.m., sharply juxtaposing the micro details of a massive attack on Paris with the vague ideology guiding the coed band of multiethnic millennial and Gen Z terrorists who carry out the assault. The film mesmerizes and alienates equally.
Read our review here. 7/13
Read our review here. 7/13

Courtesy of Superlative Films
Columbus: In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada's directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can't help but forgive the things it doesn't. The story is whisper-thin, and that's mostly a good thing: When his legendary professor father winds up in a coma, Jin (John Cho) comes to the small town of Columbus, Indiana — a real-life cornucopia of modernist architecture — to help care for him. One day, over a cigarette, he meets recent high school grad Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), an architecture buff who works at a library branch designed by I.M. Pei. They bond, both bound to this Midwestern town for family reasons: Casey worries about what leaving for college would mean for her mom, a recovering addict, while duty and tradition compel Jin to stay by his father's side. But the drama isn't so much in Jin and Casey's interactions as it is in the unlikely and unreal backdrop against which they connect. Kogonada transforms his film's spaces into expressive elements. The huge red-brick library where Casey works becomes a place of repetition and entrapment. The gleaming and immense central tower of an otherworldly suspension bridge feels like a transmitter to the divine. The façade of Columbus City Hall, which features two cantilevered walls that approach each other but never quite meet, creates a bewitching opening that, through Kogonada's camera, conveys a sense of unreachable metaphysical yearning.
Read our review here. 8/13
Read our review here. 8/13

Courtesy of FilmRise
Marjorie Prime: Leave it to Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) to make a science-fiction movie that consists of little more than scenes of two characters talking in plushly appointed living rooms. Marjorie Prime, adapted from a play by Jordan Harrison, takes place at an unspecified point in the future, when intelligent holograms of deceased loved ones (known as "Primes") have emerged as a common method of dealing with grief.
9/13

Fingerprint Releasing/Bleeker Street
Logan Lucky: In Steven Soderbergh's hillbilly heist comedy Logan Lucky, the West Virginia prison where vault specialist Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) resides is pristine and peaceful. While only a small part of this caper takes place in the prison, this setting is indicative of a tone Soderbergh excels at in his studio comedies; on the surface, these stories are unencumbered by deeper sociopolitical struggles. In a word: Fun!
Read our review here. 10/13
Read our review here. 10/13

Gravitus Ventures
Dave Made a Maze: Completed in early 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker depicted a more haunting and agonizingly slow crossing into the heart of darkness than Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now would just a few months later. In Tarkovsky's gorgeously shot film, two men hire a guide, called a "stalker," to take them into a mysterious restricted zone that seems to be alive, and which can only be traversed along an invisible path that is sensed rather than seen. Like Stalker, director Bill Watterson's impressively visual Dave Made a Maze concerns a group of people attempting to navigate a living and hostile territory seeded with threats. Dave (comedian Nick Thune), a frustrated artist, builds a cardboard maze in his apartment. Its interior is vastly larger than the exterior, and Dave becomes lost as the maze expands; his girlfriend Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani), along with the crew of a documentary filmmaker (good old James Urbaniak), cross its threshold to find him.
Read more here. 11/13
Read more here. 11/13

Babilla Cine
This Time Tomorrow: The latest domestic study from Lina Rodriguez (Señoritas) tenderly circles an absence. After an opening that invites us to regard, at some length, a tree, Rodriguez presents a series of sharply observed moments in the life of a middle-class Bogota family, often in unbroken shots in which silence — sometimes companionable, sometimes fraught — is allowed to stretch between the characters. Like real kids, rebellious teen daughter Adelaida (Laura Osma) alternates between a pitiless selfishness and a sneaky sweetness, visiting abuse or kisses upon her parents based on whichever approach will help her get her way. Mother Lena (Maruia Shelton), a party planner, and father Francisco (Francisco Zaldua), an art teacher, strive to maintain their authority in the face of Adelaida's squalls, but you can see how the effort taxes them. Rodriguez shows us the parents out with friends and celebrating a birthday at home; sometimes we see Adelaida out with her younger set, talking sex and making out. Most memorable are the glimpses of life at its most mundane: Lena and Adelaida navigating around each other in the family's small bathroom as they prep for their days, their silent awareness of each other touchingly routine. Halfway through the film, we discover that something awful has happened to this family, and suddenly frames that have been alive with three characters now seem depleted with only two. This Time Tomorrow's significant power comes from watching the survivors slowly fill the screen — and their lives — back up again.
12/13

Cinema Guild
4 Days in France: A pleasingly discursive road movie for our geosocial age, writer-director Jérôme Reybaud's debut narrative feature navigates la France profonde with the help of Grindr. "France is huge. Full of men, full of possibilities," says Pierre (Pascal Cervo), a Sorbonne appointee, to one of the temporary passengers in his white Alfa Romeo during an aimless excursion through the country. Pierre has abandoned his sleeping boyfriend, Paul (Arthur Igual), and their haut-homo-bourgeois life in Paris for reasons unknown; on his odyssey south, he meets people, whether by happenstance or via app, of different genders and ages — for sex, for conversation, for something else. With its occasional intergenerational man-on-man carnal pairings and provincial settings, 4 Days in France suggests an affinity with the films of Alain Guiraudie. But Reybaud favors more voluble characters, most of whom belong to a widely defined creative class: a retirement-home chanteuse, a Rimbaud scholar now running a tiny bookshop, a tavern owner homeschooling his teenage godson on granular French geography. "Parthenay, La Mûre, Écuisses, Issoire," that dutiful pupil recites, each place name enunciated with incantatory power. Traversing wooded enclaves in the center of the nation to hamlets deep in the French Alps to towns overlooking the Mediterranean, Reybaud's film similarly serves as a tonic lesson in physical specifics, each location populated with richly idiosyncratic conversation partners.
13/13
August 2017 Critics' Picks for Movies to See ASAP
Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for some of the best films of August 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in September.
Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for some of the best films of August 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in September.
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