The Little Drummer Boy

Of the most notable Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated films dealing with the theme of Christmas, among them being Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, and The Year Without a Santa Claus, The Little Drummer Boy is arguably the worst. Fortunately, it's about half the running...

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Crazy Rich Asians

On a miserable rainy night in London, a family from Singapore rushes in from the cold after a long flight. They've arrived at a private posh hotel. Despite their reservation, they find that it is not being honored by the hotel, whose staff likely didn't realize that Mrs. Eleanor Young was in fact...

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A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place, the horror flick from earlier this year directed by and starring John Krasinski and his real-life wife Emily Blunt, is a most brave film in a genre that sometimes competes with itself to be the loudest in the room. A Quiet Place doesn't do those usual tricks, and, as the title suggests,...

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BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee is back. With his provocative film BlacKkKlansman, "based on some fo' real shit," this part-thriller, part-drama, part-comedy flick is saturated with the kinds of societal critiques and questions that have made Lee an essential part of American cinema. He returned to this form several years...

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A Fantastic Woman

A fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tale. "A chimera. That's what I'm seeing," one woman says to Marina in A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantastica), the Chilean film directed by Sebastian Lelio that won the Best Foreign Language Film at this...

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Avengers: Infinity War

"Infinity is the end. End without infinity is but a new beginning." -Dejan Stojanovic I'll state upfront just how much I despised The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron. I found them to be overly ambitious, preposterous, overcrowded, and stupid. (These often are the problems found in many of...

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Love Simon

Simon Spier has a fairly perfect life, or so it seems. His family comfortably lives upper-middle class lives with a gorgeous home. His young sister makes breakfast practically every morning, and whether it tastes good or not, Simon and his parents are so supportive and cheer her on. He's "just like...

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Maudie

The great Sally Hawkins gives such a full-bodied, theatrical performance in Maud, the 2016 drama directed by Aisling Walsh, that one anticipates she will abruptly shout "Acting!" the way John Lovitz used to on Saturday Night Live. Hawkins is the title character, Maud Lewis, the Canadian folk artist...

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Solo

Solo (I refuse to use the subtitle because I think it's stupid), the fourth film in the famous franchise since Lucasfilm started its reboots in 2015, is the Star Wars movie nobody wanted. Neither, for that matter, was Rogue One, the first standalone movie Lucasfilm released the following year. But that...

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Annihilation

The directorial debut of writer Alex Garland, whose most famous novel is The Beach and whose screenplays include 28 Days Later (and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later), Sunshine, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd, was Ex Machina from three years ago. It was a...

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Stop, It's Oscar Time: The Best Movies of 2017

Hey there, cats and kittens. After an awful year for Hollywood and the entertainment industry but a pretty darn good one for films, 2017 showed that Hollywood has continued to inch its way in the right direction in terms of more diversity in film, better visual effects, and terrific (albeit sometimes...

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Black Panther

You will not be able to stay home, brother You will not be able to plug in, turn on and drop out You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip Skip out for beer during commercials Because the revolution will not be televised.  -"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", by Gil Scott-Heron "You...

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