Review by Andrew Swafford
There’s no breadcrumb trail in Gretel & Hansel. No gingerbread house, either. The menacing old woman at the dark heart of the story lives in a postmodernist isosceles art piece. Rather than being a one-dimensional cannibal, she’s a witch operating by her own lore – her magic powers evident in a pitch-black pigmentation running down her fingers. All this is to say that Gretel & Hansel, the new grimdark fairy tale horror adaptation by Osgood Perkins, is weird.
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Taylor Swift gets bad news over the phone – one of the star’s many unguarded moments captured by Lana Wilson’s documentary Miss Americana
Review by Michael O’Malley
As tempting as it might be to imagine the muckraking documentary that could have been, these limitations also make up what’s sneakily great about Miss Americana. By never really allowing the documentary to break from Taylor Swift’s perspective, director Lana Wilson creates a movie in which Swift is basically talking to herself about her own thoughts, experiences, and memories. Miss Americana becomes about the dialectic within Taylor Swift: what Taylor Swift thinks about herself.
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George MacKay stars in director Sam Mendes’s 1917
Review by Logan Kenny
Mendes has no aim, he has no political foundations other than the idea he should represent “the stories of war” without getting into what they mean, why they mean it, and why these people deserve to be remembered. It is a hollow husk, a decrepit abyss of hamfisted bullshit, that adds no value asides from a bunch of technical feats that don’t even make the movie any better.
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Giulietta Masina stars in director Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria
Retro Review by Miranda Barnewall
As a senior in high school, I felt that my desires to be a “strong, independent woman” and wanting a loving, committed romantic partner seemed contradictory, if not impossible. This film interrogates this paradox in a way that I didn’t think any film could adequately capture, exploring the desire for connection based on who you are and not because of what you have, and the longing to surrender that armor by putting your complete trust in someone else.
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Taylor Swift, one star among many populating Tom Hooper’s Cats, here seen drugging the rest of the cast like this is Climax
Review by Cam Watson
When I think of “bad” films, they usually evoke feelings of boredom or problematic messaging, so how do I measure a movie that is never boring and practically has no message?
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Review by Maggie Frank
Greta Gerwig's Little Women is not the most faithful to this novel, it doesn't have the best Jo, it is not the most fun, it is not the most touching, it is not the first to be directed by a woman, but it does have the most original vision and is the best tribute to the story of Louisa May Alcott.
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Check out Cinematary’s 10 favorite films of the year – as well as the individual ballots of everyone who voted.
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Adam Sandler stars in the Safdie-directed Uncut Gems
Uncut Gems’s Howard Ratner is one of the most memorably devoted acolytes of capitalism put to screen in the past decade. His total, blind faith in the very acts of spending and making money, in and of themselves, is the engine generating Gems’s labyrinthine forward momentum, and he therefore becomes aligned with the film’s self-annihilatory conscience as the arc of narrative bends back towards inevitable collapse.
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Review by Reece Beckett
On the surface, BlacKkKlansman is a freewheeling throwback buddy-cop comedy, but underneath this surface it reviles institutionalized racism (wherever it comes from - the Klan, Hollywood or the police) in a way rarely done by anyone but Spike currently.
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Review by Zach Dennis
The Rise of Skywalker is a crisis of myth. It’s easy to dismiss it as a by-product of a long-running series, or even more minimally as just a movie but that feels like a disservice to the social impact of the Star Wars series whether you’re a fan or not
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Ryan Reynolds stars in director Michael Bay’s 6 Underground
Review by Nick Armstrong
Reynolds and co. bring their established sarcasm that I feared would undermine Bay’s signature style, but said style is so excessively loud that Reynolds’s phony shtick really only highlights the borderline nihilistic destruction that takes place around him.
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Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver star in director Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story
Review by Maggie Frank
Divorce is exhausting. It's expensive. It's painful. It's brutal. And, like Marriage Story, it is engrossing to watch.
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Retro Review by Joshua Allen
Ghostwatch affects so deeply because it uses its ghosts to reckon with abuse and violence, and the ways that British society has allowed these abuses to continue.
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Robert DeNiro reunites with director Martin Scorsese for The Irishman
Review by Logan Kenny
The Irishman will not be the last gangster film, but it feels like the end. After this, it feels like there’s no point to any more of these tales.
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Review by Zach Dennis
Why does the swastika become more recognizable than the acts committed by those who wore it? Gone are the swastika, storm-trooper helmets or gray and red uniforms that have become synonymous with the National Socialist movement of Nazi Germany, and instead, we see the word “POLICE” seared on black, padded armor as the officers beat stragglers found among a recently docked train
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Review by Nick Armstrong
On a recent re-watch, I found it especially hard to enjoy anything that Kubrick brings to the table in The Shining when so much of his emotionally manipulative and abusive protagonist-turned-antagonist’s actions mirror how Kubrick himself reportedly treated the film’s other star, Shelley Duvall. Immediately following this very uncomfortable rewatch – of a film I’d go as far as to say that I truly despise – is when I realized the potential that Mike Flanagan’s long overdue sequel, Doctor Sleep, had.
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Review by Reid Ramsey
Rojo, although maybe lacking a precise narrative focus, has a wisdom to it that when paired with historical context forms a thriller truly bent on eliciting a deep shudder from audiences.
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Cynthia Ervio stars as Harriet Tubman in director Kasi Lemmons’s biopic of the historical figure
Review by Courtney Anderson
Harriet feels less like a movie and more like a video-version of Harriet Tubman’s Wikipedia page.
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Harold Lloyd stars in the classic silent comedy Safety Last!
Retro Review by Miranda Barnewall
The clock scene is enough to merit a viewing of Safety Last! It’s the climax of the movie and still has the impact that it did in 1923. But for me, it was the scenes apart from the clock sequence – the everyday sequences – that drew me in.
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Festival Coverage by Zach Dennis
On October 26, 2019, the Chattanooga Film Festival presented six feature films and 11 short films to celebrate the Halloween season. Zach was unable to attend the festival in person, but was able to watch two features and five of the shorts remotely.
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