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ARRIVAL Review

Arrival is sci-fi that thrills on an intimate level while exploring basic fundamental questions of humanity, language, and communication on a grand scale. And there are aliens. Director Denis Villeneuve (Prisoners, Sicario) is typically deliberate, bringing together immaculately composed visuals with bubbling anxiety. Where it goes and how it gets there is mesmerizing, even through some expositional redundancies and a few lulls in the extra-terrestrial conversation.

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HACKSAW RIDGE Review

Hacksaw Ridge, a true story about a pacifist who served in World War II, opens with a slow-motion montage of somersaulting bodies on fire. The juxtaposition of content is made all the more incongruent with a righteous voiceover. The intro helps set up the stark differences between the film’s maudlin first half and brutal second half in which director Mel Gibson depicts graphic battle scenes, his first opportunity to do so since 2006’s vastly superior Apocalypto. The clashing contexts fail to connect. Medal of Honor recipient Desmond T. Doss is unquestionably a hero; unfortunately, this dramatization of his heroism feels a little too sanitized despite all of the battlefield viscera.

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DOCTOR STRANGE Review

Marvel goes mystical in Doctor Strange and the addition of superhero sorcery provides a welcome change of pace in a cinematic universe that’s become much too uniform. Reality, along with architecture, is bent and folded Inception-style, with director Scott Derrickson and his effects team providing singular landscapes for comic book clashes. That said, the trippy visuals and thrilling wizardry can’t completely mask the all-too-familiar Marvel staples, including the hero’s arc and a villain who wishes to destroy the world as we know it because…well, because he’s got reasons.

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THE ACCOUNTANT Review

The Accountant has a lot of ideas without a lot of thought to back them up. There’s a ton of information provided in Bill Dubuque’s script, so much so that the film becomes a muddled mix of several different stories. All of the threads are presented as deeply meaningful by director Gavin O’Connor, but the various story elements cannibalize from each other instead of coalescing, messages and thrills lost in the over-serious jumble.

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DEEPWATER HORIZON Review

A real life disaster gets a pretty good disaster movie in Deepwater Horizon, an in-the-moment, thrilling recreation of the catastrophic 2010 drilling rig explosion off the coast of Louisiana. There’s corporate greed and blue collar heroism aplenty, but director Peter Berg, with material that’s a fine match for his handheld visual style, keeps the preaching to a minimum. The explosions, on the other hand, are huge, though not cartoonish, and don’t take away from the maddening and sobering facts of the story.

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SNOWDEN Review

Edward Snowden is a very intelligent man, he had a very interesting government job, and he did something historic by releasing thousands of classified documents to the press. We know that going into Snowden, and that’s pretty much all we know coming out of it, too.

While it’s somewhat refreshing that noted cinematic rabble-rouser Oliver Stone focuses mostly on the man and not his famous act, there’s a disconnect between the portrait painted and the motivations for informing the American public that their government is spying on them. Contextualization is elusive as the director and co-writer (with Kieran Fitzgerald) takes us through a series of events in a perfunctory manner. Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a steady performance – and his voice isn’t nearly as distracting as the trailers suggest, but we never get a sense of what really makes this guy tick.

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BLAIR WITCH Review

The words “found” and “footage” appear in the opening text of The Blair Witch Project and the film that follows ushered in a subgenre that’s been omnipresent ever since. Sure it wasn’t the first, but the 1999 flick brought the technique to the mainstream and most found footage movies since have faltered with justifying the style and/or using it effectively. For every [REC] and Cloverfield there are seemingly dozens of indistinguishable queasy-cam snoozers. Blair Witch, the sequel to the granddaddy of modern pseudo-documentary horror, belongs with the indistinguishables.

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DON’T BREATHE Review

Fede Alvarez confidently took on the challenge of updating Sam Raimi’s classic Evil Dead in 2013, splattering the screen with practical gore and filling the movie with a unique sense of dread. Though that film didn’t completely work, his feature debut showed a huge amount of promise. That potential is realized in the extraordinarily tense Don’t Breathe, a home invasion thriller that works as a stylish genre exercise while also skillfully playing with expectations and genuinely surprising us.

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HELL OR HIGH WATER Review

The dusty wilds of West Texas have proven a fine setting for crime dramas (see No Country for Old Men), and Hell or High Water uses the locale wonderfully to tell its character-driven caper. The modern Western also folds the socioeconomic realities of the present into the classic tale of cops and outlaws.

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SUICIDE SQUAD Review

Talk about a bait-and-switch. Suicide Squad is not the movie advertised under that title in trailers and TV spots for the past several months. The comic book tale of bad guys teaming up – and make no mistake they are definitely bad guys, as the movie reminds us with dialogue constantly – to take down an even worse threat was positioned as a bit of a poppy, fun course correction for the so far muddled and dour DC Extended Universe. In actuality, it fits right in.

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BAD MOMS Review

Jon Lucas and Scott Moore hit a crude comedic sweet spot with their script for The Hangover, and the comparisons with that movie and Bad Moms, which they wrote and directed, are readily apparent. Each film has three protagonists, and they all share several traits. But this is more than just a gender swap redo of debauched behavior. Bad Moms balances its vulgarity with a certain level of authenticity that hits on the realities of being an overscheduled and overstressed modern parent.

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NERVE Review

Attempting to apply practical reason to Nerve – the movie or the communal online game at its core, is a fool’s errand. However, allegorically speaking, the flashy social media thriller is occasionally perceptive in ways a bit deeper than “online danger” platitudes. It’s also energetic and boasts a cast that’s up for the ridiculous challenges. Watching dense youngsters do stupid things to gain internet fame and fortune could be as frustrating as scrolling through a teen’s Facebook feed, and while there’s plenty of stupidity on display here, it’s an informed doltishness.

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LIGHTS OUT Review

Lights Out may be a bit lacking in scary story inventiveness, but it compensates with pace and performances. Expanded from director David F. Sandberg’s own short, the movie is lean and efficient, running 81 minutes (including credits). Lulls are minimal as Sandberg and screenwriter Eric Heisserer focus on the suspense and provide just enough information to keep our bearings in the supernatural narrative. The shocks are well-crafted and the cast does a great job of selling the interpersonal drama, making it feel more genuine than many familiar family-in-crisis horror staples.

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GHOSTBUSTERS Review

In this era of reboots and repurposing, an update of 1984’s Ghostbusters was inevitable, even more so when considering a second sequel had been gestating for two-and-a-half decades. The remake certainly reveres the original – occasionally to a fault, but it also does enough to stand on its own as an enjoyable ride, driven by the performances of four great leads.

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INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE Review

Though it depicts an extinction level event, Independence Day: Resurgence feels completely inconsequential. Many things are bigger (the spaceship and the aliens, for example) than the 1996 original film, and everything is stupider. The budget is at blockbuster level, but many of the filmmaking decisions are on par with a Syfy Channel movie. I was waiting for the 3,000-mile in diameter alien craft to suck up a snarknado in its gravitational pull as it docks atop the Atlantic Ocean. (ALL of the Atlantic Ocean, we’re told).

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CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE Review

Somebody please get Kevin Hart a decent script. He’s funny and charismatic, but thus far his feature film vehicles have failed to capitalize on his charms. Much like the Ride Along movies and Get Hard, Central Intelligence casts the comedian in the role of likeable everyman thrust into dangerous situations that he shrieks his way through.