Rogue One

They did it again. Lucasfilm gave us sprinklings of our favorite characters and boldly introduced new ones that were just as fun to watch--again. In this year's Rogue One, the newest in the Star Wars franchise, there is no Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, no Rey or Obi-Wan Kenobi. No Yoda and no BB-8....

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Southside With You

Things are awkward on their first date, to say the least. Him liking pie and her preference for ice cream doesn't help, and she won't let him pay for her turkey-on-rye sandwich. She is his supervisor, and is more than cognizant of how this might look to her colleagues. The young woman on the date, Michelle,...

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The Thing

"Hounds follow those who feed them." -Otto von Bismarck Antarctica's vast, snowy landscape is a peculiar yet perfectly dreary setting for a horror film. Here, American researchers (though we hardly see any of them do any actual, you know, research) come across an infectious monster unlike any on...

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Son of Saul

Members of the Sonderkommando. Picture from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The very first frame of Son of Saul, the Hungarian film that won Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars and the Grand Prix at last year's Cannes Film Festival, is remarkably hazy until Saul, a Hungarian...

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Head

I imagine most young teenagers of the late 1960s—the ones too young to appreciate Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the ones who really dug the zany, Marx Brothers-style comedy of the two seasons of The Monkees—probably were confused out of their mind after watching Head, the 1968...

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Suicide Squad

Let's cut to the chase: The good news is that Suicide Squad, the third entry in the D.C. Extended Universe, is not nearly as bad as this spring's Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. The bad news is that it is still bad. What could have been a fun movie about antiheroes being truly heroic, an antithesis to the overly moody previous D.C. films, is instead a fairly formulaic, rather dull flick...

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The 2016 Election

When Donald Trump admitted way back in July 2015 that he thought John McCain was only "a war hero because he was captured," I thought that was it for him. Mind you, this was after his serious (and false) comments about Mexicans being "rapists," but I figured conservatives didn't really care about...

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10 Cloverfield Lane

At first I thought it was peculiar to come back to the Godzilla-like events of the 2008 monster flick Cloverfield, but then I realized that 10 Cloverfield Lane, the thriller from earlier this year, is not your average monster story. I will do my best to avoid spoilers in this review, because the less you know about the film's story going in, the better. Could I elaborate? It's best not to. Just keep...

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All the Way

Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history--by far--and yet this HBO adaptation of a Broadway play is the first that really tries to paint a picture of this legendary figure. Rob Reiner's film LBJ, due out later this year, will star Woody Harrelson as a younger...

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Captain America: Civil War

Captain America: Civil War, the thirteenth Marvel Cinematic Universe film, is borderline cinematic refuse, an epic movie that may have a consistent mood but nevertheless distrusts its audience to debate the bigger picture. There are working parts that surprisingly do not add up to anything worthwhile....

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The Jungle Book

This version of The Jungle Book feels less like Disney and more like Life of Pi for kids. Or at the very least, it's an adaptation of the very famous story that strives to embrace both Disney and Kipling, without alienating either camp. Shere Khan, the malicious tiger, is here of course, but...

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Frank Underwood Would Definitely Lose the Election

Obviously, there are spoilers below. At the end of the fourth season of the Netflix series House of Cards, President Frank Underwood, the most Machiavellian, murderous politician of our time, is in a serious mess. Journalists are starting to take seriously the allegations that he was involved...

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Road House

"Pain don't hurt." -Dalton There are few action films of the past quarter century as riveting as Road House, the 1989 adrenaline-filled thriller starring Patrick Swayze. Swayze may be better remembered for his roles in The Outsiders, Dirty Dancing, and Ghost, but they all, frankly, are inferior to...

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Chi-raq

Spike Lee, whose Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X are among the best films of the past quarter century, and are certainly among the best that have ever dealt with racial issues, has returned to societal themes in his most interesting movie in twenty years. Centering on the gun violence epidemic in Chicago, Chi-raq contains a message we desperately need. If it isn't self-evident, the title is...

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