No need to kid ourselves: Downton Abbey is less an actual movie than a special episode of the very British TV series that Yanks devoured like crumpets for six seasons from 2011 to 2016. Still, it’s fun to see the old gang again. As soon as John Lunn’s Emmy-crowned theme …
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Author Garth Stein fired a literary agent who rejected his idea of creating an entire novel from the perspective of a dog. After said novel, The Art of Racing in the Rain, spent 156 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list following its 2008 debut, Stein had the last …
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Pop quiz: What’s your favorite Nicolas Winding Refn movie? Let’s hope most folks are coming to Too Old to Die Young, the Danish writer-director’s pulpy-as-fuck TV series for Amazon Prime, as something akin to fans. Or, at the very least, as viewers semi-aware of his back catalog. Because God help …
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You do not have to squint very hard to see Brian De Palma in Domino. Not literally, mind you … he doesn’t usually take his Hitchcock fetish to constant-cameo lengths. But he’s there in the ominous zoom-in to a gun that a Copenhagen cop named Christian (Game of Thrones‘ Nikolaj …
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A new Disneynature documentary from directors Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson — they also collaborated on the studio’s bless-the-beasts-and children docs Monkey Kingdom and Chimpanzee — Penguins puts the focus on Steve, an Adélie penguin coming of age during a freezing Antarctic spring. Yup, there is a cute overload; penguins …
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It’s no surprise that Mary Poppins Returns, an industrial-strength sugarplum, doesn’t live up to the 1964 original; how do you replace the immortal Julie Andrews as the London nanny who drops from the clouds to dispense tough love. Luckily, we have Emily Blunt, an actress who makes her own kind …
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Following the fourth season of HBO’s Ballers and an Oscar-buzzed role in Spike Lee’s BlackKklansman, John David Washington — the talented son of Denzel — steps up with another forceful, socially relevant performance in Monsters and Men. In a striking debut feature, writer-director Reinaldo Marcus Green uses three perspectives to …
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If Netflix‘sAmerican Vandal wasn’t the greatest show of 2017, it was the most surprisingly great. A mockumentary from a largely unknown cast and creative team, it managed to keep the joke of its premise — two high school AV nerds doggedly pursue the truth about who spray-painted 27 dicks on …
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The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say – and the path of good intentions, we’d wager, is liberally bricked with dull, earnest important-man biopics. An adaptation of Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 book of the same name, The Catcher Was a Spy rewinds back to the mid-1930s, when …
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A seemingly ordinary coming-of-age tale that looms large because of its inclusive romantic embrace, Love, Simon wins you over by capturing your heart without pushing too hard for the prize. Given the recent high points of gay cinema on the indie circuit – the Oscar-garlanded Moonlight and Call Me By …
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