movies
Pixar's Inside Out, released in 2015, was a delightful—if tear-jerking—journey through the mind of a precocious 11-year-old girl named Riley and the five emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust) that attempted to pilot her subconscious through a disruptive cross-country move. The first Inside Out arrived on the precipice of a major change in how American culture treats mental health. While the first film's handling of Riley's slump into depression felt boundary pushing, its sequel comes at a time when the risks of talking too much about mental health are starting to be examined. In In...
Reason
On one level, The Bikeriders is a movie about a Midwest motorcycle club, the Chicago Vandals, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, as it grows and expands and eventually loses its way. But step back a bit and it's easy to see the film as a referendum on American counterculture and radical outsider movements more generally: In the movie's tragic vision, these movements start as something pure and communal and free of the pathologies of the wider world. But eventually, as they grow, they become ugly, empty, cynical, and cruel, torn apart by power struggles and depravity. Enjoy the good things ...
Reason
If you have fringe political views and some stranger shows up to offer you help committing an act of terrorism or political violence, think twice. As Reason's C.J. Ciaramella wrote in 2022, that helpful stranger is probably working with the feds. Similarly, if you're out to have a rival or a lover murdered but don't want to do it yourself, you should probably be suspicious of anyone you meet who claims to be a professional hit man. The murder-for-hire contractor across the diner booth from you is probably an undercover cop. Hit men, at least as portrayed in movies and airport thrillers, don't ...
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Cabrini is, on an obvious level, a movie about the anti-Italian animus facing swarthy newcomers to America in the late 19th century. It tells the story of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, a Catholic religious sister who arrives in 1889 to serve the desperately poor Italian-American community in Five Points, New York. She encounters her fair share of bigotry, but the obstacles that repeatedly threaten to derail her efforts come more often from City Hall than from everyday New Yorkers. Starved for resources, Cabrini convinces a New York Times reporter to write about the slum—and an avalanche of do...
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One way to understand the Bad Boys franchise is as a referendum on shifting cultural views of masculinity. The first two films, released in 1995 and 2003 respectively, followed the brash antics of two hard-charging Miami cops, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith). Mike and Marcus are a classic cinematic odd couple: Marcus is sloppy, goofy, messy, harried, and married; Marcus is handsome, uptight, hard-charging, and very, very single. But they shared a certain bro-code—vulgar, violent, competitive, sex-obsessed, and constantly engaged in insult comedy, much of which had...
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After escaping the oppressive regime of North Korea, Loh Kiwan arrives in Belgium to seek asylum, hoping to find freedom and a fresh start. Instead, he finds himself entangled in the bureaucratic limbo of the asylum process. Without money, a home, or the legal right to work, Kiwan's situation in the South Korean film My Name is Loh Kiwan (streaming on Netflix) becomes increasingly desperate. He is forced to sleep in public bathrooms in the brutal winter and scavenge for food in trash bins. Kiwan finally gets a break when he lands an illegal job at a meat factory. Even then, safety and stabilit...
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For the pop culture–savvy, artificial intelligence has long been synonymous with Skynet, the autonomous machine network introduced in James Cameron's 1984 film The Terminator. Skynet embodies the dreaded Singularity, the theoretical point where technology advances so far that it moves beyond our control. In the franchise's ever-expanding lore—stretched across six films and a TV show, so far—Skynet is an all-powerful military AI that achieves sentience. Perceiving humanity as a threat, it attacks, first with the global nuclear arsenal and then with an army of skeletal metal robots that can appe...
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The last time filmmaker George Miller dipped into the Mad Max universe, in 2015, he gave us Fury Road, a roaring, rumbling, rowdy epic of vehicular mayhem that wasn't just the best action movie of the 2010s but the best movie of that decade, period. Yes, there are other contenders, but no other picture released during that span matched Fury Road's combination of ambition, originality, exuberance, and thematic heft. There was a silent-film purity to its story, which was essentially just a chase scene extended and elaborated to feature length. And there was a frantic intensity to its cascading s...
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