How fitting that the “Planet of the Apes” franchise continues to evolve, despite forever encircling the same inescapable themes of inhumanity — even in a post-human world — and the double-edged sword of technological advancement. Wes Ball’s lush and nuanced “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” might lack the epic sweep or revolutionary fervor of the recent Matt Reeves movies that salvaged this series from the stink that had been on it since 2001, but this well-honed adventure still…
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Unfrosted 2024
It’s funny that both of Jerry Seinfeld’s movies have been pegged to such high-concept premises, as the sitcom legend famously built his brand with a show about nothing. In fact, that might be the funniest thing about them. First came 2007’s deeply strange “Bee Movie,” in which Seinfeld — who produced, starred in, and co-wrote the project — voiced a honeybee who starts getting hot for a human florist. Now comes Seinfeld’s directorial debut, a sketchy and surreal business parody…
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Mars Express 2023
Like so many cyberpunk movies before it, Jérémie Périn’s ultra-cool and dazzlingly animated “Mars Express” is sustained by the vertigo between the boundlessness of computer technology and the banality of what people do with it. What separates this accomplished French “Ghost in the Shell” homage from its most obvious touchstone — and from several other detective stories in which a police team of people and androids investigate what it means to be human — is the film’s determination to dismantle…
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Unsung Hero 2024
Titans of the faith-based filmmaking industrial complex they helped to create, Kingdom Story Company founders Andrew and Jon Erwin built their brand on the Christian rock biopics “I Still Believe” and “I Can Only Imagine,” ultra-benign stories of faith, loss, and profit that rely on powerful songwriting to compensate for sermon-like storytelling, and frame their subject’s artistic success as both a testament to their faith and a megaphone for the word of Jesus Christ. Absent the rigor or artistry of…
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Humane 2024
A single-location thriller set in an imminent-seeming future where food scarcity has forced every country on Earth to cull its population by 20 percent, Caitlin Cronenberg’s slight but steel-eyed “Humane” takes a hard look — or at least an unflinching glance — at the irreconcilable relationship between self-interest and saving the planet. The broadly representative premise screenwriter Michael Sparaga uses in order to examine that dynamic: A family dinner at the castle-like estate of a former news anchor (Peter Gallagher),…
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Mourning in Lod 2023
“Mourning in Lod,” made by the Israeli director Hilla Medalia, was originally conceived as a documentary short about a murdered Israeli man whose kidney was donated to a Palestinian woman in East Jerusalem who would have died without the organ transplant. That feel-good story of grace and humanity amid the violence of the 2021 Israel-Palestine crisis is still on the surface of the potent, if scattershot, 71-minute feature that Medalia cut together in the end, but it’s almost completely overshadowed…
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Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver 2024
“Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver” has been dead since last December, when the irredeemable first chapter of Zack Snyder’s hyper-derivative space opera was released “in theaters” and on Netflix to deafening silence. As I concluded my review at the time: “It’s hard to be even morbidly curious, let alone excited, about any future iterations or installments of a franchise so determined to remix a million things you’ve seen before into one thing you’ll wish you’d never seen at…
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare 2024
Cinematic universes may be on the decline, but Guy Ritchie has just stumbled upon the potential for a fun one with his frequently amusing “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” a light and sloppy World War II caper that reimagines Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) as Nick Fury, and a series of rakish, Nazi-killing brutes as his own personal Avengers.
Men on a mission films like “The Guns of the Navarone” might seem to be the more obvious points of reference here,…
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Challengers 2024
If, as Blanche Dubois once said, “The opposite of death is desire,” then Luca Guadagnino will live forever, and his latest film — a transcendently sweaty tennis love triangle so turned on by the heat of competition that its sex scenes feel like foreplay and its rallies feel like porn — is possibly the most unbridled portrait of resurrection since “The Passion of the Christ.”
It’s definitely the horniest story ever set within the purgatorial concrete nothing of New Rochelle,…
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Malu 2024
Like so many daughters throughout history, especially the ones that still live at home, Malu Rocha (Yara de Novaes) exists in a state of constant rebellion against her mother. A volatile, weed-loving, Rio-born actress who dreams of turning the family house into a community theater for the kids who live in the local favela, Malu relishes every opportunity to cause a scene in her own living room, even — or especially — if that opportunity comes at the expense of…
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Sting 2024
The redback spider, also known as the Australian black widow, is the kind of creature that might shake a person’s belief in God. This Lovecraftian nightmare freak hunts its prey with balletic precision and squirts them with organic superglue before injecting them with a venom that liquifies their insides; it then binds the victim in a silk straightjacket so that they’re still alive when the redback drinks their organs. It mostly feeds on insects, but has been known to devour…
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The Long Game 2023
Dennis Quaid’s fading career prospects and emergent Reagan fetishism have spurred a recent swerve into inspirational — often explicitly Christian — films about hard-luck white guys who find salvation through classic American values like prayer, football, mid-century warfare, and lowering taxes on the rich.
That trend unambiguously continues with his supporting role in Julio Quintana’s “The Long Game,” an underdog sports drama in which Quaid plays the reluctant patron of a Mexican-American high school golf team in a hyper-racist Texas…