Nothing better than when people make a “live-action” version of a beloved manga/anime and replace the gorgeous artwork and animation with butt ugly CGI effects. Plus: Checked-out Hollywood types instead of impassioned voice actors. What an upgrade!
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Oppenheimer 2023
Is light made up of particles or waves? Quantum mechanics tells us it is both. How can it be both? It can’t. But it is. It’s paradoxical, and yet it works.
So is this movie, and so does this movie. It’s three hours of government hearings and physicists sitting around in college classrooms and labs arguing about scientific theories and world events that happened 80 years ago. And yet it is also an incredibly tense (and sometimes shockingly sexy!) drama. How can it be both? It can’t. But it is.
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The Taste of Things 2023
This goes way beyond food porn. This is like a food snuff film.
Its opening cooking sequence dwells on the creation of a consommé. The gourmet at The Taste of Things’ center explains that this process involves clarifying a broth. This process, he says, gives the soup a subtle flavor and a deeper color.
Great movies do this too. They delight us with their subtleties and their rich colors. And sometimes they even clarify the mysteries of life in an hours-long sensorial feast.
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PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie 2023
Somehow the dogs are all still puppies and yet they also have tragic backstories that took place a long time ago. The internal logic of the Paw Patrol is an endless source of fascination for me.
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Expend4bles 2023
From the very beginning, The Expendables has always been a better marketing hook than an actual franchise — and to be sure, the idea of a bunch of old school action icons teaming up to kick ass one last time (or, uh, four last times) is a great marketing hook. In practice, the films themselves have varied from “meh” to “mostly crummy,” and this one is the worst yet. It barely lives up to its own premise; the only old…
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Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One 2023
Only Tom Cruise could make a movie where a guy lying beside a horse and then ordering the horse to stand while he gracefully swoops onto his back in one fluid motion like he and the horse share a telepathic bond is maybe the sixth or seventh best stunt.
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American Fiction 2023
The satire is solid, and it is greatly enhanced by a structural conceit. While Monk’s book and the way it works its way through the literary world (not to mention Hollywood) pokes fun at the stereotypes expected from stories about African Americans, Monk’s family busts all those stereotypes in warm and funny and sad ways. Plus, it’s great to see Jeffrey Wright in a leading role. Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing him as Felix Leiter or the Watcher or…
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Fallen Leaves 2023
All cinephiles have their own personal tastes and personal preferences, and things they irrationally love no matter what. And here is one of mine: I do not think I am capable of giving a negative review to any movie that contains a good karaoke scene. And (spoiler alert) Fallen Leaves contains a really good karaoke scene.
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Priscilla 2023
Lost me after Elvis and Priscilla finally tied the knot and the story began zooming by at hyperspeed. (Jacob Elordi goes from beautiful young Elvis to ridiculous jumpsuit and sideburns Elvis is about four minutes of screentime, which amounts to about six years in the guy’s life.) Until that point, this is an extremely sensitive and at times quite surprising depiction of this relationship in all of its fraught dimensions. Obviously, it’s also an interesting examination of Sofia Coppola’s favorite subject: The way wealth and fame and privilege can be both heaven and hell all at once.