film reviews

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  'Riff Raff' Is a TIFF Laff

  Directed by Dito Montiel

  PUBLISHED Sep 9, 2024

  'Riff Raff' is a masterwork of typecasting: there's Jennifer Coolidge as a sloppy drunk, Ed Harris as a gruff patriarch who balances caring...

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  'Nightbitch' Has Both Bark and Bite

  Directed by Marielle Heller

  PUBLISHED Sep 8, 2024

  Of all the human experiences, motherhood is a particularly visceral. There's childbirth, of course, but then there are the the struggles...

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  'Shook' Tells a Different Sort of Scarborough Story

  Directed by Amar Wala

  PUBLISHED Sep 7, 2024

  Movies set in Scarborough tend to show the beauty of the area through its grit and the trauma that follows. While there's certainly a need...

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  'The Life of Chuck' Is a Self-Serious Bore

  Directed by Mike Flanagan

  PUBLISHED Sep 7, 2024

  This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with saccharine sentimentality and ponderous monologues about the meaning of life. The...

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  Anderson .Paak's Star Power Makes 'K-Pops' Pop

  Directed by Anderson .Paak

  PUBLISHED Sep 7, 2024

  Anderson .Paak is hardly the first musician to sidestep from music to movies, but his filmography to date is extremely thin, mostly...

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  'Paying for It' Is a Wonderful Bit of Oversharing

  Directed by Sook-Yin Lee

  PUBLISHED Sep 7, 2024

  The backstory alone is unlike anything else: filmmaker/musician/artist Sook-Yin Lee and cartoonist Chester Brown were in a romantic...

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  'Presence' Is an Unexpected Fake-Out

  Directed by Steven Soderbergh

  PUBLISHED Sep 6, 2024

  More often than not, Steven Soderbergh's career is spoken of as this kind of Soderbergh movie or that kind of Soderbergh movie. His...

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  'The Last Showgirl' Ushers In the Pamassaince

  Directed by Gia Coppola

  PUBLISHED Sep 6, 2024

  The Pamaissance is here. After 2022's 'Pam & Tommy' reappraised Pamela Anderson as a sympathetic hero, the 2023 doc 'Pamela, a love story'...