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The scenario presented in Arrival isn’t new - motion pictures have been dramatizing an event of this sort almost since moving images first flickered on a big screen. We wonder about it, dream about it, imagine it, and write about it. Popular te...

Final Account may ultimately be more important for the voices it immortalizes than for its worth as a conventional documentary. The film’s mission is simple: seek out as many ex-Nazi survivors as could be found at the time of the production ...

Lamb, the feature debut of Valdimar Johannsson, is the latest export from Iceland to indicate that movies from that corner of the world may not be the most palatable to mainstream American audiences. Johannson has had plenty of experience with...

Mary Magdalene occupies a curious middle ground between philosophical arthouse movie and Easter-themed faith film. Although generally true to Biblical traditions associated with the title character, the filmmakers avoid overt references to th...

Kudos to Darren Aronofsky for having the courage to make this film. Kudos to Paramount Pictures for having the guts to open this wide rather than burying it or hiding it as a VOD release. It’s too bad it doesn’t work.With mother!, Aronofs...

Every horror fan deserves the occasional (decent) fix, and in the midst of one of the bleakest movie months of the year, Primate delivers. There’s nothing terribly original about Johannes Roberts’ rabid chimpanzee tale, but that’s kind o...

Whodunits are rarely a good playground for Hollywood films. The average mystery, whether a stripped-down Agatha Christie-esque tale or a more complex endeavor, is too demanding for the structural constraints of a motion picture. As a result, when o...

Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve embraces a bleak worldview, or at least that's what his filmography would lead audiences to believe. His celebrated movies, which include Incendies, Prisoners, and now Sicario (and will soon add the long-gestat...

It's so easy -- too easy, in fact -- for a war movie to turn into a celebration of blood, death, and mayhem. Exploitation of wars and their dehumanizing affects has become a staple of American action films (First Blood, Missing in Action). Occasi...

James Marsh's The Theory of Everything is an unremarkable bio-pic about a remarkable man. Its ordinariness is in large part compensated for by an extraordinary performance from lead actor Eddy Redmayne. Those looking for a chronology of the life of...