Movie Review

All of the uber-muscled, color-drained visual and aural bombast in the world can’t hide the ugly truth about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. It’s dumb as bricks.

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What’s interesting about Pee-wee’s Big Holiday is that it must do the impossible: Measure up as a sequel to a true original. By its nature, this latest Pee-wee film retreads some of the same material, though in the most respectful way. That said, it does the best possible job rekindling the spirit of the first.

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Experimenter is one of the best and most overlooked films of the year, and definitely worth catching up with as soon as possible.

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An expertly crafted drama with impeccable performances, a tight script, stunning set and costume designs, and a brisk yet thoughtful pace, director Todd Haynes’ newest film, Carol, soars.

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Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer trade in the same kind of faux-clever one-upsmanship that Holmes and Watson do in ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ with similarly weak dialogue but barely a quarter of the charm.

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Chappie, out on Blu-ray now, may be a mess, but it has a strange kind of staying power, amidst all the madness.

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This electrifying film puts the tension, the fear, the courage, and the tragedy in perspective, and dramatizes it through the struggles of people, not rhetoric.

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Trey Hock had the chance to chat with writer and director Jennifer Kent about her new film The Babadook which is in theaters this Friday.

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Very, very rarely a movie comes along that transcends the perceived limitations of being a “horror” or “scary” movie and becomes a full-fledged work of art. The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, and The Shining are some examples, and now you can add The Babadook, showing exclusively in Kansas City starting Friday at Screenland Armour, to that list as well.

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Both Whiplash and Nightcrawler are models of fast-paced, engaging storytelling that leaves a mark.

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It’s no news to fans of the young-adult book series by Suzanne Collins that this third movie only covers a portion of her third novel, which is par for the course, I suppose, for a film that contains a both a colon and a hyphen in its title. But even in the Star Wars series, which now retroactively features the word “Episode” in each title, the films themselves had a form of resolution. Sometimes there were cliffhangers, sure, but the emotional journey and theme of each film were wrapped up by film’s end.

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In films like 21 Grams, Biutiful, and Babel, he revels in the misery of his characters and then contrives to make them even more miserable. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of misery and pretentiousness in Birdman (which is subtitled The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) but its mostly psychosomatic—and often played for laughs, which is a new thing for Iñárritu.

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The ABCs of Death 2 moves quickly and most of it is ultimately very forgettable, but I still find myself drawn toward its desire to be different and truly artistic in its approach.

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Trevan and Trey welcome new contributor Will Findley before talking about Boyhood and Guardians of the Galaxy, two vastly different, but outstanding movies.

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The really great action movies are all about urgency—that life-and-death situation where the stakes couldn’t be any higher and the main character doesn’t have any other choice but to forge ahead.

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