Showing Up is a quiet slice of life from the great Kelly Reichardt. Reichardt’s latest takes us into the world of the Portland art scene where we look at an artist’s preparation for her latest show and the stresses that she deals with in the week leading up to it. It’s a delicate, amusing, and surprisingly stressful film about the creative process and being an artist. Michelle Williams, working with Reichardt for the fourth…
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As I was sitting in my screening of Air, Ben Affleck’s latest directorial effort about how Nike got Michael Jordan to sign with them, I was wearing a pair of Jordan shoes, specifically a pair of Jordan Retro 1s, which look exactly like the first pair of Nike Jordan’s, but mine were a different color. Since several other people in the theater and I were wearing Jordan shoes and Jordan apparel, it was safe…
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The opening scene of John Wick: Chapter 4 finds John Wick (Keanu Reeves) in the underground training facility of the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), the only assassin in this ever-expanding world of assassins who was willing to help John after he was labeled “excommunicado” by the High Table. John is getting ready for his ultimate revenge against the High Table, looking healed, strong, and angry, as he takes his aggression out on a wooden training…
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Boston Strangler is like David Fincher’s Zodiac and Maria Schrader’s She Said had a child: a tense, chilling newsroom procedural about a serial killer terrorizing a city and the two women who broke the story while facing adversity in the workplace. Set in 1960s Boston, Boston Strangler introduces us to Loretta McLoughlin (Kiera Knightly) a writer for the Boston Record America who mainly writes reviews for new house appliances, as most women do at…
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Scream VI takes the Scream franchise to a place it’s never been before: cross country to New York City. Usually taking place in the fictional Californian city of Woodsboro (except for Scream 3, which took us to a Hollywood film set that resembled Woodsboro), going to New York seemed like the next logical step in a horror franchise that has been going on for nearly twenty-five years. We’ve seen Friday the 13th do it…
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The 2023 Academy Awards are here! Despite hardly ever agreeing with who wins at the Oscars and the constant controversy surrounding the nominees and the show in general, I always get excited about Oscar night. Like most years, some categories seemed locked up based on precursors and awards-season wins. But there are quite a few categories that are still wide open or down to a battle between a couple of nominees, which should make for…
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Last Hurrah for Chivalry, one of the first feature films from action maestro John Woo, just recently got added to the Criterion Collection. The good folks at Criterion sent me a copy of the film to check out. Before he became known as the master of the bullet-riddled heroic tragedy, John Woo sharpened his trademark themes and kinetic action choreography with 1979’s Last Hurrah for Chivalry. Unaware they are caught in a deadly game of…
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The 2023 Academy Awards are here, which means the 2022 movie year is almost officially over. This year’s Oscars finds Everything Everywhere All at Once leading the way in nominations with eleven, followed by The Banshees of Inisherin and All Quiet on the Western Front with nine, respectively. This year’s Best Picture nominees are a strong bunch of movies. Seven of the ten films nominated landed in my personal top twenty movies of 2022, with four of…
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Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre is a globe-trotting, slick spy thriller that is non-stop fun and never overly complicated. Operation Fortune gets going right from the start. Co-writer/director Guy Ritchie wastes no time in establishing the players of the film. Nathan (Cary Elwes), working for some sort of British intelligence agency, is putting together a team of the best spies he can get his hands on in order to stop the sale of deadly…
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Michael B. Jordan makes his feature directorial debut with Creed III, an exciting, emotional, and impressively-made film that solidifies that this franchise belongs to Jordan. After winning his final fight against “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew), the boxer he fought at the end of the first film, Adonis (Jordan, proving once again why he is one of the best leading men working in Hollywood today) is now retired from boxing. We find him a…
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