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Avengers: Endgame
Eleven years ago, Iron Man changed comic book movies forever. Not only was the movie great, it was the beginning of a journey through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with each film offering something new while also being connected to one large story. Avengers: Endgame is the culmination of that 22-film saga. From this point forward,…
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What’s Up, Doc?
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged,” writes G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy, “They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.” If…
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Gloria Bell
April is too early to be talking about the Oscars, but sometimes a gem comes along that’s worthy of the discussion. Director Sebastián Lelio isn’t well-known to American audiences. His only English-language feature prior to this year was 2017’s Disobedience. But Gloria Bell could be the film that changes all of that for good. Bell…
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Captain Marvel
As we anxiously wait for the conclusion of ten years of buildup in Avengers: Endgame, Marvel has released Captain Marvel to sate our appetites. Now let us go back to a time before the Avengers, a time known as the 1990s… A Unique Approach As the twenty-first film to come from the Marvel Cinematic Universe…
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Rashomon
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Paddleton
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Mary Poppins Returns
The mass media, with their cult of celebrity and their attempt to surround it with glamour and excitement, have made Americans a nation of fans, moviegoers. — Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism ‘What is the nature of the search?’ you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in…
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If Beale Street Could Talk
Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle both directed Oscar-nominated movies this year. The last time that happened was in 2017 when Chazelle’s La La Land was mistakenly announced as the Best Picture winner only to be supplanted by the true Best Picture winner — Jenkins’ Moonlight. The debacle was a distraction from what should have been…
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
My Spider-Man was the 1981 “Spider-Friends” version, complete with invented sidekicks, incomprehensible Saturday morning subplots, shoddy animation, and a little dog too (spoiler: they were all killed off by a vampire in the 2014 Spider-Verse story arc because… comics). My brother had a Mego doll and Underoos when we were kids (I had the Hulk),…
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The Snowman
