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Posted inMovies & TV

A Complete Unknown Satisfies Only Your Lowest Expectations for a Bob Dylan Biopic

Director James Mangold’s latest bit of Oscar bait has the vibrancy and depth of a Wikipedia article.

Director James Mangold has made a Bob Dylan biopic that unfolds like an Oscar-bait bingo card, with Timothée Chalamet performing a functionally-solid impression of the icon as a rising teen star. Ultimately, “A Complete Unknown” provides no more thought on Dylan than a Wikipedia article.

Posted inHoliday Guide 2024 🎅

Season’s Reelings:
Your 2024 Holiday Movie Guide

Spend time NOT talking to family with our preview
of the holidays’ most-hyped new releases.

  [Editor’s note: Read all our holly jolly HOLIDAY GUIDE articles here. Looking for a print copy? Good! You can find it in more than 500 spots across Portland with this handy map!]   Holidays are usually meant for time with family, which is obviously why so many people elect to go to the movies […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s Gloriously Dumb and Luminous Opus

When it’s truly singing, the infectious film gestures at the passion and poetry that come from an artist with nothing left to prove.

Megalopolis is the career-culminating passion project of Francis Ford Coppola, a director whose over 50 years of filmmaking have set his name in stone. This time—more than 13 years since his previously, mostly self-financed ghost story Twixt—he borrowed the full $120 million budget for Megalopolis against the 25 percent stake he owns in the fifth […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Evil Does Not Exist Is About Glamping and Other Forces Beyond Our Control

The new film from Drive My Car director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi strays from the clean conservationist message that would typically accompany such beautiful cinema of the natural world.

At the center of Evil Does Not Exist—the latest narrative feature from Japanese writer-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car)—a town hall meeting unfolds. As is the nature of most town hall meetings, the intent is to gather feedback, in this case from the locals of Mizubiki village, a rural community just a few hours outside […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Beast Is a Sci-Fi Time-Traveling Romance Alive With the Anxiety of 2024

Bertrand Bonello crammed so much into this film that it threatens to tear at the seams, but Seydoux’s and MacKay’s chemistry holds it together.

Like Gabrielle waiting for the metaphorical “beast” to swallow her whole, with a Bertrand Bonello joint you’re always prepared for something to happen, for the whole film to veer into terrain both surreal and unsettling.

Like Léa Seydoux waiting for the metaphorical “beast” to swallow her whole, with a Bertrand Bonello joint you’re always prepared for something to happen, for the whole film to veer into terrain both surreal and unsettling.

a movie that is both a period piece and a critique of period pieces

Bertrand Bonello crammed so much into The Beast, that it threatens to tear at the seams, but Seydoux’s and MacKay’s chemistry holds it together.

Posted inMovies & TV

Film Review: Hold Your Water, Dune: Part Two Is Worth the Wait

Denis Villeneuve crushes our senses beneath the magnificence of space opera scale and spectacle.

Dune: Part Two is large. This is nothing new—Dune: Part One was large too. Largeness is much of the point of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 chode of a sci-fi novel, which was inspired by the author’s stint studying the ecology of sand dunes near Florence, Oregon, plus several mushroom trips. […]

Posted inMusic

It’s Vince Staples’ Portland, We’re Just Living in It

Eric White Vince Staples performs tonight at Hawthorne Theatre; details here. “I’m not trying to be rich—as long as my mom’s okay,” says rapper Vince Staples. He doesn’t hesitate to describe his childhood in Long Beach, California, in explicit detail, vividly illustrating what it was like growing up between gangs and socioeconomic dead ends. Last […]

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