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After the Hunt
(2025)
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Lovia Gyarkye
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While After the Hunt is occasionally gripping it's more often a plodding film that abandons any promise of real, complex insights in order to chase the fleeting highs of unsatisfying provocation.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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Nuremberg
(2025)
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Elizabeth Borgwardt
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The screenplay suggests that casting people into legal limbo is a harbinger of darker times to come.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
(2025)
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Beatrice Loayza
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Instead, the film shines as a character study. As alienating as it is recognizable, Linda’s fickle behavior makes her a poor symbol for all mothers, refreshingly so.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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Sentimental Value
(2025)
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Alana Pockros
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In the hands of Trier, the sentimental becomes a site of real growth. Watching Sentimental Value, any viewer will get the sense that Trier is dedicated to a classic tradition of filmmaking one doesn’t get to see so often nowadays.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
(2025)
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Naomi Gordon-Loebl
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In Scott Cooper’s new biopic we see a version of Bruce Springsteen that’s been stripped of all the complexity, contradictions, and political substance that made his work enduring in the first place.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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The Mastermind
(2025)
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Vikrum Murthi
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Kelly Reichardt’s latest, a sly 1970s drama involving a museum theft, probes the broken politics of the decade.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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One Battle After Another
(2025)
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John Semley
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One Battle After Another, a sensational adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, captures the manic energies of a country on the brink.
Posted Dec 17, 2025
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Eddington
(2025)
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Kelli Weston
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So much of what doesn’t work about Eddington finds its origins in this lack of curiosity and reticence to reckon with the uglier dimensions of what afflicts this country.
Posted Sep 10, 2025
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Jurassic Park
(1993)
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Stuart Klawans
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Steven Spielberg wants you to jump, and you do. I suppose he could get an audience to wiggle its ears on cue. But this is all autonomic activity. The forebrain has nothing to do.
Posted Jul 01, 2025
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The Gold Rush
(1925)
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Gilbert Seldes
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Essentially it is hokum, but it is Chaplin's supreme talent to endow everything he does with life, and the hokum disappears under his magic hands, becoming the pure gold of comedy.
Posted Jun 24, 2025
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Rancho Deluxe
(1975)
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Robert Hatch
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The comedy is energetic.
Posted Mar 27, 2025
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Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins
(1975)
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Robert Hatch
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Dick Richards directs the show hard and fast, fighting for laughs every mile of the road and getting quite a few -- never mind how.
Posted Mar 08, 2025
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Shampoo
(1975)
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Robert Hatch
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I was not amused by Shampoo as farce, nor instructed by it as satire.
Posted Mar 03, 2025
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Barry Lyndon
(1975)
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Robert Hatch
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Barry Lyndon is as stultifying as it is prodigious. For a start, the picture appears to have been designed by someone who learned the art at Madame Tussaud's.
Posted Feb 25, 2025
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Anora
(2024)
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Beatrice Loayza
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In Sean Baker’s tragicomic film of a sex worker’s brush with wealth, he evokes auteurs of yore, who focused on the social realities of the country’s outcasts.
Posted Nov 09, 2024
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No Other Land
(2024)
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Ahmed Moor
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No Other Land is a documentary in the literal sense of the word: Basel and other activists are documenting their dispossession.
Posted Nov 06, 2024
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The Apprentice
(2024)
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David Klion
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There is guilty pleasure to be found in a comfortably malevolent Cohn tutoring an unformed Trump, but there’s limited pathos in watching the pupil reject the master...
Posted Oct 25, 2024
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Union
(2024)
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Ella Fanger
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It would be a great line to end the documentary on, but Union doesn’t give us that satisfaction...the film ends on a sobering note...
Posted Oct 19, 2024
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Megalopolis
(2024)
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Stephen Kearse
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Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited magnum opus is a flop.
Posted Oct 08, 2024
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Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play.
(2024)
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Tiana Reid
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The "play" in Slave Play is a confrontation with the multiple meanings of "play" and their inextricability from each other...
Posted Sep 30, 2024
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Janet Planet
(2023)
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Nora Caplan-Bricker
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The playwright's remarkable debut film immerses the viewer in the sounds and sorrow of a middle-schooler's endless summer.
Posted Jun 27, 2024
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Evil Does Not Exist
(2023)
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Phoebe Chen
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Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, an eco-thriller set in a sylvan Japanese town, explores the messy entanglements of human, machine, and nature that make up planetary existence.
Posted Jun 13, 2024
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Challengers
(2024)
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Erin Schwartz
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Challengers is worth watching for the cinematography alone, by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a frequent collaborator of both Guadagnino and the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul...
Posted May 06, 2024
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Flaming Creatures
(1963)
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Susan Sontag
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Flaming Creatures is a triumphant example of an aesthetic vision of the world -- and such a vision is perhaps always, at its core, epicene. But this type of art has yet to be understood in this country.
Posted May 02, 2024
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Love Lies Bleeding
(2024)
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Beatrice Loayza
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If the ensuing carnage feels mostly rote, Glass does manage to conjure a climactic image that brings together the film's ideas about excess and power, gender and fantasy...
Posted Apr 17, 2024
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The Big Heat
(1953)
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Manny Farber
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The characters seem to be wrapped thinly around steaming amounts of vengeance, avarice, or cruelty, but Marvin and Ford make it a well-acted movie that offers interesting impressions of how a practical-minded American male operates in crises
Posted Apr 11, 2024
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Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
(2023)
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J. Hoberman
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Indeed, given Jude’s willingness to engage with (or disinclination to disengage from) the cyber-powered second life, Do Not Expect is more despairing if even funnier than Bad Luck Banging.
Posted Mar 30, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls
(2024)
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Vikram Murthi
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Ethan Coen’s horny homage to American film history’s many strains of queer comedy highlights the collaborative aspect inherent in his project as a director.
Posted Mar 30, 2024
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The Searchers
(1956)
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Robert Hatch
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Wayne's behavior is presented as the heroic stuff out of which the West was made. In fact, the ex-soldier he portrays is a psychotic with homicidal tendencies which he is given almost almost unlimited opportunities to indulge.
Posted Mar 25, 2024
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Dune: Part Two
(2024)
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Jorge Cotte
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The film warns us against the very thing it gives us. We watch from reclining chairs as Paul starts a holy war—our hands are clean. We get the heroic battles and the guilt on the side. Our hero is tortured so we don’t have to be.
Posted Mar 12, 2024
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About Dry Grasses
(2023)
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A.S. Hamrah
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Long, dense, and elliptical, Ceylan’s films are thorny and difficult, and rousing in their starkness.
Posted Mar 01, 2024
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Joan Baez I Am a Noise
(2023)
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Sarah Seltzer
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I Am a Noise, a career-spanning documentary, makes it clear that the folk singer was one of the most important political musicians of her generation.
Posted Jan 02, 2024
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American Fiction
(2023)
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Stephen Kearse
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A buzzy film adaptation of Percival Everett’s Erasure, a novel about publishing’s racial politics, misreads what is truly ailing the book industry.
Posted Jan 02, 2024
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May December
(2023)
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Beatrice Loayza
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Todd Haynes’s discomfiting and hypnotic suburban melodrama examines topics the director knows well: sex, taboo, and control.
Posted Dec 29, 2023
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Phantom Parrot
(2023)
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Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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Phantom Parrot sheds light on the Orwellian technologies being used across borders to repress activists, journalists, and others.
Posted Dec 11, 2023
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The Killer
(2023)
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Beatrice Loayza
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The Killer works because there’s more than mere automaton stylings. There’s a tension, heightened by each tight frame and scrupulous composition...
Posted Dec 04, 2023
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Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks
(2002)
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J. Hoberman
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A three-part, nine-hour look at the painful decline of a once-thriving industrial zone...Wang has immersed himself in the lives of migrant workers...
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Youth (Spring)
(2023)
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J. Hoberman
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The prolific director examines how the People’s Republic became the workshop for much of the world.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Three Sisters
(2012)
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J. Hoberman
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Wang’s magnificent 2012 portrait of young children in a subsistence-level village in Yunnan province...
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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State Fair
(1933)
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William Troy
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Not since Wallace Beery’s The Champ has any American picture striven so hard for a feeling of place. The choice of Phil Stong’s novel was of course an excellent one for the purpose.
Posted Nov 10, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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Jorge Cotte
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Unlike the visions of unbounded freedom found in traditional westerns, Martin Scorsese’s new film is a study of a West bounded by the vertical geometry of oil rigs and the violent conspiracies of powerful men.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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Jeet Heer
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Killers of the Flower Moon offers a vivid and compelling study of racism as domestic violence.
Posted Oct 27, 2023
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The Killing of Sister George
(1968)
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Harold Clurman
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The spurious seriousness of the picture spoils the comedy, while its brave assault on convention is little but hollow show.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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The Birthday Party
(1968)
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Harold Clurman
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Pinter’s ear is so keen, his method so economic and so shrewdly stylized... that his play succeeds in being both funny and horrific. He is aided in this by Friedkin’s direction.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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Uptight
(1968)
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Robert Hatch
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Dassin, if he was issuing a warning, should have been explicit, and not allowed the viewer to wonder whether the implication he senses are no more than ineptitudes of presentation.
Posted Oct 03, 2023
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Traffic
(2000)
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B. Ruby Rich
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While the film does well at imagining a world cut loose from moral quadrants, where right and wrong are not clear choices and all decisions seem tainted by compromise, its imagination is confined to a US model.
Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Afire
(2023)
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Phoebe Chen
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Afire plays with that feeling of disjuncture before catastrophe alters what seemed at first like a listless summer into a week freighted with loss.
Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Sound of Freedom
(2023)
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Chris Lehmann
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The conflict and intrigue coursing through Sound of Freedom is not all that different from standard suspense-thriller fare, with overwrought asides in the film’s dialogue to remind viewers...
Posted Aug 15, 2023
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Shortcomings
(2023)
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Jeet Heer
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The movie Shortcomings lacks Tomine’s visual intensity. Despite this loss, it’s a fine film. I suspect it’ll spark many heated conversations about race, ethnic self-hatred and sex. If so, I also hope it brings more readers to the graphic novel.
Posted Aug 04, 2023
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Barbie
(2023)
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Tarpley Hitt
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In trying to say too much, the film winds up not saying much at all.
Posted Jul 31, 2023
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