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  A Thousand and One 2023

  ★★★½ Watched 28 Jan 2023

  It took an embarrassingly long time for the significance of the title of writer/director A.V. Rockwell’s feature to become clear, but once it did, it snapped into focus everything the story was trying to say about it’s particular time and place. It opens in mid-1990s New York, where ex-convict Inez (Teyana Taylor) emerges from prison determined to be reunited with her 6-year-old son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who has been remanded to foster care. When she abducts him away from…

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  Passages 2023

  ★★★★½ Watched 27 Jan 2023

  In hindsight, there’s something pitch-perfect about the fact that the movie Tomas (Franz Rogowski), the filmmaker anti-hero of co-writer/director Ira Sachs’ feature, is making at the outset is titled Passages, produced (like this movie) by SBS Productions; if nothing else, it’s a portrait of a kind of solipsism whereby you just assume everything must be all about your needs. The premise finds Thomas beginning an affair with a woman named Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos)—one that he has no problem immediately telling…

Popular reviews

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  Knock at the Cabin 2023

  ★½ Watched 31 Jan 2023 25

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  The following is my spoiler-free capsule coverage for City Weekly:

  There are occasions when it’s a curse to know the changes a movie has made from its source material—and hoo boy, is that ever the case with this adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s novel The Cabin at the End of the World from co-writer/director M. Night Shyamalan. His set-up remains the same: At an isolated cabin, gay couple Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) are enjoying a vacation with their…

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  The Lion King 2019

  ★★ Watched 10 Jul 2019 2

  What if this Lion King had come first? It’s an interesting thought experiment, sort of a second-cousin to the idea that drives the current theatrical feature Yesterday: What if we woke up in a world where Disney had never released a hand-drawn animated film called The Lion King in 1994, and this story were appearing now for the first time, in the age of photorealistic CGI recreations of real-world animals? If there’s anything wrong with it—and by extension, with Disney’s…