Paul Thomas Anderson would like you to travel back in time with him. He’s taken us backwards before: the early 20th century West in There Will Be Blood; a curdled postwar America in The Master; London’s Fifties fashion world in Phantom Thread; the morning-after hangover of Sixties SoCal counterculture in …
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The year is 1967. Gil-Scott Heron is on the hi-fi, the Vietnam war rages on TV screens, and New Jersey is burning. A Black cab driver is beaten by two white cops in Newark, which sparks protests, violence, looting and, eventually, the deaths of 26 people; the four-day uprising will …
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“Her emotions were on no ordinary plane,” Fanny Logan says of her cousin and best friend, Linda Radlett. “She loved or she loathed. She laughed or she cried. She lived in a world of superlatives.” This is an extremely high standard to set for Linda, heroine of the three-part miniseries …
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For an upcoming feature story tied to September’s third season premiere of FX’s What We Do in the Shadows, I spoke with the cast and creative team of the vampire comedy about what’s made it the funniest show on TV. In one of those conversations, star Matt Berry noted that …
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Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead — adapted from Michael Koryta’s 2014 novel of the same name — starts as three stories before whittling its way down to one. In the first, a smokejumper is haunted by memories of a burn gone wrong, in which she and other firefighters …
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When my children were younger, they loved a series of books by Laura Numeroff and illustrator Felicia Bond with titles like If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Each book follows an animal along a series of random adventures where one thing leads to another (the cookie makes the mouse …
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It begins in Monte Carlo. A lady’s maid has a chance encounter with the storied Maxim de Winter: rich, handsome, a recent widower. He sends her a note: “Come for a drive.” So begins a succession of daily rendezvous and, increasingly, beachside scenes befitting the French riviera’s enthralling, cliffside shores …
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If you want to be bored breathless by how Serbian inventor Nicola Tesla (1856-1943) figured into the feud between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over direct and alternating currents, try 2019’s The Current War. It’s biopic trolling at its dullest. Or you may want to consider Tesla, which is both …
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Folklorists will tell you that la llorona is a ghostly figure said to be a crying mother doomed to grieve for her drowned, dead offspring in perpetuity, and it takes a while to figure out how the Latin American legend fits into Jayro Bustamante’s extraordinary, eerie-as-hell horror movie. (It streams …
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Before it hits a bump in the plot that throws it out of whack, An American Pickle rides high on a double dose of Seth Rogen, with the brash comedian plays dual roles separated by a century. The first is Herschel Greenbaum, a ditch-digger from the fictional Eastern European shtetl …
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