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The Brilliantly Performed ‘Fancy Dance’ Has a Few Too Many Steps | Exclaim!
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Every year film festivals release a certain type of film — usually a drama starring an actor riding a wave of positive buzz (or established and trying to make a comeback), and they aim to tell a socially conscious and perhaps underseen story. These are, to use the vernacular, awards bait. These films tend…
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Tribeca 2024: Darkest Miriam Explores Grief, and Those Moments Where We Feel Stuck | That Shelf
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There’s something relatable about those times when we feel listless, stuck, or unable to move forward. Sometimes, this is a response to a sudden loss or a not-so-sudden life experience, but most of us have been there at one time or another, at that place where forward momentum seems impossible to generate. From director…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘Group Therapy’ Review: Six Comedians Get Honest and Vulnerable About Mental Health | Movies We Texted About
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Comedy is one of the great cultural forces. It is, in many ways, the great equalizer. In the hands of a talented performer, comedy speaks truth to power, whether that means mocking our leaders or finding commonality in the human experience. It’s the latter of these that filmmaker Neil Berkeley’s latest documentary, Group Therapy, in which six…
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Tribeca 2024: Presumed Innocent Updates the 90s Classic With Mixed Results | That Shelf
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Where the series falters is in its updates to the story. For fans of the original, some characters are removed or re-positioned. Case in point: there’s no Sandy Sterns in this version (though maybe it’s a good idea not to try to top Raúl Juliá). There are also several red herrings that go nowhere,…
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Tribeca 2024: The Weekend Is a Thrilling Film About the Horrors of Family Dinner | That Shelf
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You don’t choose your family. Some of us are blessed with loving homes, and others come from complicated situations. The Weekend, a fun new thriller from Nigeria, features one hell of a complicated situation. Nikya (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) is an orphan, but she’s begun the journey of starting a new family with her fiance, Luc (Bucci…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘Beacon’ Review: A Novel Setting, but A Disappointing Misfire | Movies We Texted About
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[…] The first half of the film does a good job of setting up the two lone characters in opposition.Emily is suspicious of Ismael, the lone and lonely man living in this remote place, and Ismael is wary of Emily because of a steadfast belief in the supernatural, going so far as to warn her not to brush her…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘Brats’: Andrew McCarthy Looks for Closure | Movies We Texted About
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In the mid-1980s, Andrew McCarthy starred in a number of highly successful teen films. You’ve probably heard of at least two of them: St. Elmo’s Fire and Pretty in Pink. He and several other young actors were positioned at exactly the right time and place to create a cultural moment. Teen stories were smart, popular, honest, and fun in ways they hadn’t been before, and…
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Tribeca 2024: ‘All That We Love’ Offers a Familiar Portrait of Grief and Awkward Family Dynamics | That Shelf
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There are few things in life as devastating as the loss of a pet. Pets are members of our family, our companions, and unlike people, pets (dogs especially) always offer their love unconditionally. A loss like this can leave a person reeling, and no matter what our societal norms around them are, they are…
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‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ Finds a New Galaxy Within the ‘Star Wars’ Universe | Exclaim!
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Star Wars has had problems for a while now. The various Disney+ series have been a mixed bag, but one thing they all have in common is that, critically maligned or acclaimed, they all tend to start strong. The problem is that starting strong isn’t enough, and more than a few of the series have fumbled their endings. The other…
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‘Atlas’ Movie Review: Another Soulless Netflix Action Movie | Movies We Texted About
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If any of this sounds familiar, that’s likely by design. Almost every idea in this film is lifted from a better movie. The mech suits are from Avatar; the AI characters are a mix of the robots from I, Robot, replicants from Blade Runner, and Samantha from Her. The hardened main character is paired up with a character she initially detests but…
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Sweetland Review: A Bittersweet Story About the Difficulty of Change | That Shelf
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The town is dying. That’s the start of Christian Sparkes’ new drama Sweetland. It’s not entirely clear why, but the town is metaphorically crumbling. The residents have a chance at government-assisted relocation and job retraining, but the offer is only good if every resident takes it, and Moses Sweetland (Mark Lewis Jones) doesn’t want to.…
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‘Dark Matter’ Is a Dimension of the Multiverse That Looks Kinda Like All the Other Ones | Exclaim!
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Multiverses are so hot right now. The idea of a limitless number of parallel dimensions, spinning off from every decision everyone makes, is a household idea and has been at the centre of several movies, such as Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the animated Spider-Verse films and Everything Everywhere All at Once,…
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‘Star Wars: Tales of the Empire’ Review: Short, Stunning, and Uneven | Movies We Texted About
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Each story is told in three episodes, each approximately 15 minutes long. The length of these episodes is key; if they were any longer, there’d be too much opportunity for the story to meander. As told, each is concise and thematically to the point. These are the kinds of stories that short films can…
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Doctor Who Review: Ncuti Gatwa Is Off to a Very Fun, Very Silly Start | That Shelf
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It feels like this series could have been an immediate follow-up to Davies’s prior run on the series. The tone and style feel in line with Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant’s runs on the series, with a mad alien and a bright-eyed human travelling space and time in a blue box and fixing problems…
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The King Tide Review: A Stark, Stunning Canadian Thriller | That Shelf
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… [D]irector Christian Sparkes captures both the scope and feeling of living in a small but tight-knit community. There’s authenticity to how the characters behave around each other and the closeness with which they speak and act, even when antagonistic. The tone of these scenes at the end is nearly pitch-perfect, and the script by writers…