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Laika, the Oregon animation house that specializes in stop motion, has a perfect track record of landing Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations for all four of its first films: Coraline, ParaNorman, Missing Link, and Kubo and the Two Strings. With its…

If David Ellison wants a ticket to the Oscars this year it most likely won’t be with anything from Paramount or even (so far) from Warner Bros, but if you said Netflix you might be on the right track. Ray Gunn, from Oscar-winning filmmaker Brad Bird (Rat…

14th, the documentary directed by Ava DuVernay that premiered Friday night as the closing-night film of the New York Film Festival, begins with several American presidents taking the oath of office: FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan… each of them swearing to "preserve, protect, and…

Remaking Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 classic Japanese kidnap drama High and Low was a good idea, and last year Spike Lee did exactly that with his own homage to the master in Highest 2 Lowest, a contemporary update set in the music business in New York City…

Smart grown-up dramas are an increasingly rare bird in major-studio big-screen cinema these days. Occasionally around this time of year a studio will throw one out as Oscar bait, but a form that was once a big part of the movie diet now seems headed for…

Artificial, which had its world premiere Monday at the New York Film Festival, certainly comes in with a bit of controversy attached. Produced and made under Amazon MGM Studios, the Luca Guadagnino film about the origin of OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman and key creative Ilya Sutskever, was shopped…

On paper, director Tom McCarthy’s latest film A Statement might appear to be a dense polemic, hardly the stuff of exciting moviemaking. It centers on a 1980 Florida conference dealing with the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the environment…

It has been 14 years since Tony Gilroy last directed a feature film, 2012’s The Bourne Legacy. Before that was Duplicity and in 2007 his sensational Oscar-nominated Michael Clayton. He has been busy though, notably the critically acclaimed TV series Ando…

Colleen Hoover had written 16 of her wildly successful romance novels before switching gears in 2018 and taking a shot at writing a psychological thriller, Verity. She even self-published it, and it led to yet another literary triumph, one that seems…

Digger is unlike any film coming from a major Hollywood studio in years, at least in my memory. It makes sense it comes from Warner Bros, which is the one major that seems to take real swings with big budgets, directors and stars in films you might say…

Over 30 years have passed since Ang Lee worked his magic on Jane Austen's 1811 novel Sense and Sensibility, and, aside from a 2008 BBC miniseries, it's taken until now for someone else to have a bash at a feature film version. It's surprising it's taken…

Going to see Heart of the Beast is a dangerous proposition if you don’t want to be seen crying uncontrollably in public. This man-and-his-dog story is an emotional roller coaster that lays it all out there, and I lapped it up just like I did in My Dog Sk…