You do not hire Jason Statham to read love poems onscreen, or to weep gently at the sight of nuzzling puppies, or to gaze thoughtfully at a particularly breathtaking sunset. You hire the Derbyshire native to kick ass and take names, with the “names” part being optional. The cinematic missing …
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Kids have always talked to their stuffed animals. In Ted, the bawdy teddy bear fantasy that has yielded two R-rated movies and now a new prequel series on Peacock, the furry beast talks back, often in a four-letter flourish, always with the delivery of some out-of-time Boston vaudevillian. He also …
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All of the signaling around Echo has suggested yet another Marvel Cinematic Universe fiasco in a long line of them in the years since Avengers: Endgame. The miniseries, spinning off a supporting character from 2021’s Hawkeye, was originally set to premiere last November, then got pushed back to an early …
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A lot has changed in the 20 years since Regina George and the Plastics first stalked the halls of North Shore High. Every teenager now has a smartphone. Social media has given several generations new ways to slay, shame, and talk shit. The Internet is one massive Burn Book. And …
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Netflix’s new K-drama, Like Flowers in Sand, is a series without waste — a deliberate, consoling dive into ssireum, a traditional form of South Korean wrestling, set in an unassuming Geosan town reflected perfectly in Jang Dong-yoon’s earnest and unrefined Kim Baek-doo. The series begins as Baek-doo’s ssireum career ostensibly …
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The three C’s of current TV documentary programming are celebrity, crime and cults, and the new Lifetime docuseries The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard checks off the first two with ruthless, pinpoint efficiency. The subject, a young woman who arranged for the murder of her deranged, abusive mother in …
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A luxury item that seemingly every warm-weather homeowner covets, the swimming pool has somehow become troubled waters for a wide range of movie and TV characters. In The Swimmer, it’s a symbol of personal decay for Burt Lancaster’s alcoholic suburbanite. In the simply-titled Swimming Pool it’s the stuff of Franco-British …
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Liz Danvers, chief of police in the remote Alaska town of Ennis, and heroine of True Detective: Night Country, is fond of telling other cops they’re asking the wrong questions, prodding them over and over until they ask the right one. With Night Country, there’s only one question: Was it …
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Did you hear the one about the little girl adopted by a couple who then insisted she was actually an adult and was trying to kill them? There’s a decent chance you did. More than 10 million viewers tuned in to The Curious Case of Natalia Grace, the ID docuseries …
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Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer, the comic’s seventh stand-up special for Netflix, opens with a quote about the nature of success by Henry David Thoreau before capturing the comic in stark black-and-white, moving through the crowd in slow-mo (cigarette in hand, naturally) to Radiohead’s “Daydreaming,” like a championship boxer before a …
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