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Why Him?
Very Good 66 Points 2016

Middle-America clashes with Silicon Valley as much as a dad clashes with a future son-in-law in Why Him? This makes for a funny movie, with lots of LOLs and a side-splitting scene or two. Yet, it would have been funnier with a stronger cast, starting with a better comedic lead than James Franco…

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WikChip Image James Franco owes Keegan-Michael Key
La La Land
Really Great 83 Points 2016

La La Land is everything it’s cracked up to be: romantic, brilliant, whimsical, thought provoking, so L.A. Thus, it’s a great date movie and a worthy best picture contender, the latter all the more likely after it swept the Golden Globes. Plus it reunites Ryan Gosling & Emma Stone, the Bogie …

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Deepwater Horizon
Great 17 Points 2016

I wonder if BP’s stock took another hit when this movie was released – just like it did during the disaster. Peter Berg lays the foundation of the money-hungry corporation vs. the hardworking Texas oilmen. Wahlberg and Russell play their roughneck roles very well. Russel is the grisled leader an…

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Toni Erdmann
Really Great 66 Points 2016

A professionally successful woman mystifies her foolish father in the brilliantly funny Toni Erdmann. Nominated this year for the Best Foreign Language Oscar, its comedy comes from the juxtaposition of unconditional love with highly conditional status, the former in a family, the latter in a mo…

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WikChip Video Woman on the verge of a breakdown
The Salesman
Great 66 Points 2016

The Salesman validates my love of movies by bringing to the screen a slice-of-life at once prosaic and yet theatrical, and insanely thrilling. It’s also familiar to a Western audience, though set in Iran. Yeah, it’s an Iranian movie, making it utterly fascinating to Westerners like me who are i…

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WikChip Video Asghar Farhadi describes his film
Kedi
Great 83 Points 2016

Kedi is a movie for cat lovers, perhaps the first movie for cat lovers. This documentary about stray cats is often shot from a cat’s eye view. But more than that, Kedi is deeply in tune with feline characteristics.

Cat lovers know the signs: the gracefulness, the hauteur, the affection, th…

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WikChip Video Cat Fight!
Get Out
Really Great 83 Points 2017

Get Out melds edgy African-American humor with classic horror movie tropes, the admixture delivered with near Hitchcockian mastery. That’s how Jordan Peele’s brilliant movie brings the Black Lives Matter sensibility to horrific life. The conceit is not that whites don’t care if blacks live or d…

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WikChip Video The multifaceted Mr. Peele
Guardians of th...
Great 83 Points 2017

Vol. 2 is a great time at the mall multiplex, if not the nearly perfect blockbuster experience that Vol. 1 was. Faint praise perhaps, but then this first sequel has nearly impossible shoes to fill, as the origin movie was so effortless in its joyous affectations. Still, a great blockbuster like t…

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WikChip Video Kurt Russell & Friend
The Mummy
OK 17 Points 2017

Such a drop-dead easy movie to make. After all, since the 50’s, mummy movies have been a successful stable. Who knew that Russell Crowe and Tom Cruise could take it to such a low. The scorned-woman who makes a deal with the devil was just too far afield for me, and in the end, the film seemed l…

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Wonder Woman
Really Great 83 Points 2017

Miss Israel kicks ass as Wonder Woman. But that’s not all, not by a long shot. Wonder Woman is a perfect superhero movie, deeply of the genre, yet soaring above it. That puts it in the small pantheon of DC movies, deadly earnest in the DC tradition, a la The Dark Knight

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WikChip Video That's right, the women are smarter.