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The article discusses the current state of the film industry and the challenges it faces in producing successful movies. It highlights the dependence on non-superhero blockbusters and the lack of mid-budget movies that cater to adult audiences. The focus is on the movie "Hit Man," directed by Richard Linklater, which was bought by Netflix and had a limited theatrical release. The author questions whether the film is truly a mature and grown-up movie, as it combines elements of comedy and film noir but lacks the depth and moral exploration typically associated with adult-oriented films. [Extracted from the article]

"Challengers" is a film about two male tennis players who are in love with each other, and the girl who comes between them. The story follows their history as doubles partners, roommates, and best friends, and their attempts to win the affections of a female tennis star. The director, Luca Guadagnino, films the story with homoerotic undertones, emphasizing the connection between the two male characters. The female character's role diminishes as the story progresses, highlighting the natural partnership between the two men. [Extracted from the article]

An excerpt from the published article on "The New York Times" on Nov. 30, 2021 is presented which focuses on the argument against abortion, emphasizing that abortion is a form of killing a unique human organism.

M. Night Shyamalan's film "Trap" explores the challenges faced by hardworking suburban fathers. The movie follows the life of Cooper, a father who leads a double life as a serial killer known as "the Butcher." When Cooper takes his daughter to a Taylor Swift concert, he discovers that law enforcement has turned the arena into a trap to catch him. The film focuses on Cooper's attempts to escape the trap while ensuring that his daughter has the best night of her life. However, the movie loses faith in its own concept in the third act, shifting the focus away from the father-daughter dynamic. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the movie "Civil War" directed by Alex Garland. The author expresses disappointment with the lack of clear political and strategic background in the film, as well as the absence of ideological divisions. The story follows journalists traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C. during a civil war, but the characters are seen as sketches with predictable arcs. The author argues that the movie fails to address the underlying issues and fault lines that sustain conflicts, making the warning about polarization implausible and insubstantial. [Extracted from the article]

"Dune: Part Two" is a film that explores the concept of greatness and the hero's journey. The movie follows the protagonist, Paul Atreides, as he embraces his destiny as a prophet, messiah, and general. The story takes place on the fictional planet of Arrakis and involves a conflict between different factions. While the film is visually stunning and faithful to the source material, it introduces some alterations to reflect present-day preconceptions, such as a stronger emphasis on skepticism and a feminist perspective. Overall, the movie presents a complex portrayal of greatness and heroism. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the film "Anyone but You," a romantic comedy that unexpectedly became a sleeper hit despite receiving poor reviews. The author expresses disappointment with the film, criticizing its plot, dialogue, and character development. However, they acknowledge that the film's success highlights a desire among audiences for traditional Hollywood fare and suggest that a well-written script could have made a significant impact. The article concludes by mentioning the potential of Shakespearean ideas for future films. [Extracted from the article]

"The Holdovers" is a 1970s-set prep-school movie directed by Alexander Payne. The film follows Paul Giamatti's character, Paul Hunham, a classics teacher at the Barton School, who is tasked with babysitting a group of students who are stuck on campus during the Christmas holidays. The story explores the forces that shape the lives of both the young and older characters, with revelations and moral dilemmas unfolding throughout the film. The setting in the pre-smartphone era allows for a certain kind of secret-keeping and adds to the artistic attraction of the story. [Extracted from the article]

May December, directed by Todd Haynes, is a highly acclaimed film that explores the taboo topic of a female teacher engaging in a romantic relationship with a teenage male student. The movie follows Natalie Portman's character, Elizabeth, as she investigates the past of Julianne Moore's character, Gracie, who had a scandalous relationship with a seventh-grader and later married him. The film delves into themes of prurience, satire, and weirdness, but ultimately leaves the audience puzzled and disappointed by withholding clear explanations and plot resolutions. Despite the strong performances by Portman and Moore, the film's infatuation with its own inscrutability detracts from its overall impact. [Extracted from the article]

Ridley Scott's film "Napoleon" portrays the French emperor as an epic weirdo, a mumbler, and a growling sex pest. The movie lacks charisma and fails to capture the complexity of greatness. Some critics argue that the film is a deliberate Anglo joke upon the French, while others see it as part of Scott's larger effort to keep the big-budget epic alive. Despite its flaws, the film does offer visually stunning battle scenes. However, historical cinema still awaits a successor to Scott who can truly appreciate the dreams and ideas of the past. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on consideration of reaction of contemporary Christians to decline of their churches and mentions secularization of culture. Topics discussed include approach of Christian to politicism that accepts fact of pluralism, reconciliation with liberalism in secularizing aspect, and hegemony of American Protestantism.

As it does in this case, where being overlong and miscast and ideologically uneasy doesn't prevent Killers of the Flower Moon from being probably the best movie of Scorsese's late career. FILM REVIEW Killers of the Flower Moon transcends its many flaws The three-hour-and-26-minute running time of Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon gives the viewer ample time to meditate on the movie's various weaknesses. Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman, and now Killers have all broken the three-hour mark, and each one would have been a better movie if some philistine studio boss had told Scorsese, "Bring it in 30 minutes shorter, I don't care what you cut.". [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses about Catholicism. Topics of discussion includes since Second Vatican Council, American Catholicism is fully reconciled to liberal democracy with anti-liberal and radical Catholic periodicals and writer and "liberal Catholicism" and a "conservative Catholicism" that are aligned with Democratic and Republican party. This lead to political Catholicism that exists beyond categories of American left and right.

The hard-pressed everyman did not win much of anything from the GameStop wars, and as Thompson noted at the time, one of the biggest winners from the mania, because it owned a lot of GameStop, was the populist bête noire BlackRock. Dumb money, a film about the wild meme-stock days of early 2021, when internet investors drove the price of the decrepit video-game chain GameStop to the moon, is an engaging little movie that feels confused about what kind of story it's telling. That's not bad for a former meme stock - others look a whole lot worse - but it means that plenty of the ordinary buyers who joined the crusade were genuine "dumb money", buying in during the ascent and then losing on the downside. [Extracted from the article]

That vocation makes an interesting moral counterpoint to Washington's older action-hero peers, Keanu Reeves's John Wick and Liam Neeson's avenging father in the Taken movies. It's a theme the Equalizer movies continue, with Washington's McCall deploying his ex-operative skills to equal the scales between innocents and gangsters. But I have seen a different future - one that's reactionary, based, biblical, and Roman Catholic - revealed in that unfailing oracle, the Equalizer saga, whose prophetic work unfolds in between the vigorous beatdowns administered by its aging action hero, Denzel Washington's Robert McCall. [Extracted from the article]

Tár, probably last year's best film, was the work of Todd Field, whose last movie came out 16 years before. Film Bring Back The Auteur ROSS DOUTHAT NEARLY every story about the diminishment of the movie business contains some discussion of how Hollywood's star-making capacities have dwindled. But from Gerwig's perspective they offer much more room for the personal touch, the director's creative vision, than simply surrendering her talents to Black Widow Meets Black Panther (not a real movie, to be clear). [Extracted from the article]

All this sets up a third act in which Barbie and her real-world friends have to save Barbieland via various battle-of-the-sexes maneuvers, and Barbie herself has to choose whether to stay in her plastic utopia or embrace embodiment, mortality, the works. Led by Ryan Gosling, the stereotypical Ken to Robbie's original-version Barbie, their existence is purely ornamental, their only purpose to draw an occasional glance from President Barbie or Airline Pilot Barbie. The portrait of Barbieland parodies a certain kind of feminist utopia, and the movie sends signals that are pro-motherhood and skeptical of gender-interchangeability. [Extracted from the article]

I care about the bomb and the atomic age; I don't really care about Lewis Strauss's confirmation, and ending a movie about the former with a dramatic reenactment of the latter seems like a pointless detour from what made Oppenheimer worth making in the first place. Film Atomic Cocktail ROSS DOUTHAT IT feels deeply ungrateful, from a filmgoing perspective, to say anything especially negative about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, which (together with Barbie, of course, about which more in a future column) just made The Movies feel culturally important, as something other than a superhero-and-sequel factory, for the first time in a long time. The scene at war's end, when Oppenheimer speaks to a cheering, flag-waving crowd while his mind is assaulted by intimations of Armageddon, could have ended the film as well, and I would have walked away satisfied. [Extracted from the article]

That's the question hanging over No Hard Feelings, on the one hand a game attempt to recapture the spirit of big- screen, big-star comedy, a spirit that somehow died completely in the last ten years … and on the other hand a very strange exercise, a sex comedy without real sex or romance, that has the right idea about what it's against but no clear sense of what it should be for instead. That's an odd place for a sex comedy to falter, and though I endorse its mes- sage I can't really endorse the movie. Instead, today's "sex recession" is also a dating recession, a marriage recession, and a fertility recession - all part of a gen- eral, technology-mediated retreat from human interaction that appears to be making young Americans miserable as well as decorous, depressed as well as docile. [Extracted from the article]

Last summer the critic Noah Millman wrote an essay on his personal Substack about Five Easy Pieces, the Jack Nicholson movie, now more than 50 years old, that embodied the 1970s tendency toward a cinema of deep reality - real in its portrayal of the then-contemporary world, real in its psychological acuity, real in its refusal of simple narrative arcs and easy resolutions. That kind of cinema, Millman suggested, was never Hollywood's main business outside of the "aberration" of '70s auteurdom; even by the 1980s, most movies made for grown-ups had tilted back toward portraying worlds that were "glossy, unrealistically well-off, more generally constructed to feel like a fantasy." One case study would be Nicole Holofcener, who has directed seven movies in the last two decades, all defiantly small-scale, most of them with female leads, many of them with plots that aren't quite plots in the usual Hollywood sense, that don't necessarily go where you're expecting and sometimes don't seem to go anywhere at all. [Extracted from the article]

And audiences aren't fleeing a nakedly politicized Disney so much as they are drifting away from dreary storytelling: It wasn't the presence of gay characters in last year's inert Lightyear and tedious Strange World that tanked their box office, but that the political signaling felt particularly heavy-handed given that the movies had nothing else to offer. And a Disney whose movies don't inspire that love any longer is a Disney that's more vulnerable than a visitor to the Magic Kingdom might suspect. Politics has something to do with this rut, though often in a subtle rather than a flagrant way: In the age of woke, Disney's storytellers seem uncomfortable with the old fairy-tale reliables, such as sweeping romance and outrageous villainy, and instead keep trying to reinvent the Disney movie with more familial drama and more impersonal antagonists. [Extracted from the article]

We begin in 1996, with best friends and tech nerds Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson, also the movie's director) delivering a pitch for a device they call PocketLink, which combines cellphone technology with email capability, via a tiny, thumb-friendly keyboard. If "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative" was famously the deadliest headline that the editors of the 1980s-era New Republic could imagine, then BlackBerry may merit the deadliest possible capsule summary: "Worthwhile Canadian Business Movie." Film I DON'T remember where I was for the hinge moment of the early 21st century, the great cultural turning point that arrived when Steve Jobs stepped onto a San Francisco stage bearing the first iteration of the iPhone. [Extracted from the article]

Margaret, played by Abby Ryder Fortson, is a 1970s only child of a cradle-Christian mother (Rachel McAdams) and a Jewish dad (Benny Safdie) whose parents wrench her out of New York City and cast her into the wilds of Jersey. Film THE claim of disillusioned rightwing dissidents, that conservatism exists just to preserve the last round of liberal innovation, is sometimes applied unfairly, but you can feel its potency in the way that any cultural production from before the age of woke-ness now feels a bit right-wing. [Extracted from the article]

But the Mario movie is less a proof of concept for a new age of classically themed children's storytelling than a kind of lowest-common-denominator success story. OURS was not a video-game household, but Nintendo still cast a long shadow over my 1980s childhood. There's no attempt at "gritty reboot" energy, of the sort you had in the weird live-action Mario movie starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo 30 years ago. [Extracted from the article]

Damon, sporting a heavy gut, is reliable as ever, but his Vaccaro doesn't feel like a talent-spotting genius so much as a likeable gambler who happens to bet right in this particular case. One of the more deserving beneficiaries of this general trance was The Last Dance, a documentary ostensibly about Michael Jordan's final title run that flashed backward to cover the entire Chicago Bulls dynasty, all its outsize characters rotating around its ruthless superstar. The early days of the pandemic were a time of mass transfixion, as millions of suddenly housebound viewers tuned in to the same streaming shows and Netflix specials, catching up on The Crown or obsessing about Tiger King. [Extracted from the article]

But mostly the movie moves the way an ideal childhood summer does, free from the demands of plot and time alike. Here Keegan's nameless narrator becomes an Irish girl named Cáit, played by the first-time actress Catherine Clinch with a watchful intensity. Knowing little about the movie The Quiet Girl except its title and its Irish setting, you might be inclined to imagine it as a long-delayed sequel to or spin-off of John Ford's Gaelic-fisticuffs epic The Quiet Man - one in which the granddaughter of John Wayne's Irish-American boxer returns to rural Ireland to face down, I dunno, somebody. [Extracted from the article]

And not only with the masses: The critics like it, other parents like it, it has good vibes on a scale I haven't seen for a kids'-movie sequel since Paddington 2. Film IT'S been 13 years since the last time I set foot in the Shrek extended universe, with Shrek Forever After, a movie I barely remember even after digging up the review to jog my memory. A sequel to a little-remembered spinoff sounds like barrel-scraping, but it turns out that this is exactly what the people wanted - Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is a major theatrical hit. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on reconciliation of Catholic Church with pluralism and mentions contribution to presentism in life of the church. Topics discussed include cultural conformity to be project on Catholics of politician persuasions, institutional crisis and numerical collapse of realities of the church, and message on human liberation lost by Catholic Christianity out of secularity.

Long before the movie reveals whether the quartet is legit and the sacrifice necessary, it's clear that the movie is not on Andrew's side on principle - that he's being asked to love the world enough, bigotries and all, to want it to survive even at some harrowing cost. Film THERE have been three phases in the career of M. Night Shyamalan. The setup places a gay couple, Eric and Andrew (Jonathan Groff and Ben Aldridge), in a far-from-civilization vacation cabin with their adopted daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui). [Extracted from the article]

AMID an absolute box-office bloodbath for the autumn's Oscar-bait movie releases, I wrote over at my daily-newspaper day job an essay arguing that the problem wasn't just with an audience conditioned to head to the theaters only for the latest in computer-generated spectacle. After that essay appeared I received an email from a Hollywood insider expressing strong agreement with my thesis and also saying, by the way, that a movie they themselves were involved with, due out shortly, was exactly the sort of thing I said was missing from the scene. That movie is A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks as a curmudgeonly widower and based on a Scandinavian novel, A Man Called Ove, which sold a lot of copies some years back. [Extracted from the article]

THIS year's Best Picture nominations are both a solid-enough set of choices and a decent snapshot of the condition of the industry. The part of me that wants to see the Academy Awards celebrate crowd-pleasing entertainments and actual movie stars is rooting for the Top Gun sequel, which took what seemed like the most cynical imaginable strip-mining of '80s pop culture and turned it into a truly glorious popcorn-movie experience. You have the Avatar sequel and Top Gun: Maverick representing the real business of Hollywood, the blockbuster-sequel factory, but with unusual creativity and verve. [Extracted from the article]

The innovation of the sequel is to send the first movie's hero, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who has become one of the forest Na'vi via a mix of science and sorcery, into exile among the ocean Na'vi, to escape the space marines hunting for him and his blue-skinned wife and kids. If I were tasked with making a case for the seriousness of James Cameron's Avatar movies - the second of which, The Way of Water, is making the same endless billions as the first one 13 years ago - I would reach for Lewis and L'Engle. A RECURRING theme in Christian science fiction - explicitly in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, implicitly in Madeleine L'Engle - is the idea that some planets beyond Earth might hold creatures who never experienced the Fall, and that the human state of alienation might not be a universal among creation's sentient species. [Extracted from the article]

But first let's talk about a more curious case: Glass Onion, Rian Johnson's sequel to his murder-mystery hit Knives Out. And not a single movie in the Oscar-bait slate, the prestige movies that dropped between October and the New Year, has managed to earn even $25 million at the box office, let alone become a major hit. Every movie in the box-office top ten was some kind of big-budget sequel or reboot. [Extracted from the article]

But thanks to The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg's coming-of-age movie about growing up to become Steven Spielberg, I now know that it wasn't really my fault. It was so much easier to just write my stories down, and play the movies I wanted to make from them inside the theater of the mind, than to enter worlds where I was less immediately comfortable - the worlds of technique and organization and machinery, where the collaborative art form we call "the movies" is actually forged. WHEN I was a boy I loved the movies. [Extracted from the article]

In the end, The Menu wants to have it both ways, redeeming the art of cooking while also pushing its satire of the chef - patron relationship all the way to a Grand Guignol conclusion. OF all the realms of human entertainment, the one that is most alien to me is the elite food show. The ordinary food program, with the friendly celebrity chef who walks you through a simple-to-prepare meal, is not my cup of tea, but I can grasp the utility of the experience, insofar as it invites a form of participation - you, too, can cook and eat this dish!. [Extracted from the article]

Pádraic is dimmerand kinder than Colm and more contentwith Inisherin than most everyoneelse on the island, or so it seems--helives with his spinster sister Siobhán(Kerry Condon) and a cute little donkeywho's always slipping into their sharedliving quarters, and he's entirely comfortablein his general routine, whichincludes picking up Colm to head downto the pub for a pint and then talkinghis ear off about the tedious details ofsmall-farm life. Film THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN, a bleakIrish tragicomedy from themind of the playwright-turned-filmmakerMartin McDonagh, is basicallya literalization of the long-runninginternet joke about how "menwill literally do X instead of going totherapy"--with "X", depending on thememe or tweet, being anything from"learn everything about ancient Rome"to "commit elaborate murders based onthe Seven Deadly Sins" to "found theTimurid Empire and be heralded as oneof history's greatest military commandersand tacticians." But themore the lens widens beyond Farrell'ssubtle performance, and beyond Colmand Pádraic's frenmity, the more themovie feels like a similar sort of tiringcaricature. [Extracted from the article]

Finally there's the Georgia-David story, which of course tends toward their reconciliation, but which flips the old Parent Trap script by making Georgia the one who has the age-inappropriate significant other (a French airline pilot, played with himbo charm by Lucas Bravo), while David sleeps alone. Since Ticket to Paradise is a bad movie, we get none of that - but we do get a blithe fantasy of ditching the meritocracy, burying the girlboss so the beachfront wife might live, that's somewhat interesting in and of itself. Let's get the preliminaries over with: Ticket to Paradise, starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney as a divorced and estranged couple who reunite in Bali to stop their daughter from going through with an unsuitable marriage, is a pretty terrible movie. [Extracted from the article]

Vesper is a small, imperfect movie, but its world is rich and strange indeed. These unhappy arrangements are disturbed by a crash landing, a Citadel craft that ditches in the forest, leaving a posh survivor, Camellia (Rosy McEwen), lying unconscious, to be found by the questing Vesper. Such is the case with Vesper, a science-fiction fairy tale produced on a definitely-less-than-Marvel budget by two filmmakers, Kristina Buozyte of Lithuania and Bruno Samper of France, with an English-language script and cast. [Extracted from the article]

Film GEORGE MILLER, the director of Three Thousand Years of Longing, an extremely unexpected motion picture in which Tilda Swinton romances a genie, has certainly earned the right to direct any movie he wants. So if now Miller wants to make a movie, lifted from an A. S. Byatt short story, about a chilly British academic finding love with a luxuriously handsome djinn played by Idris Elba, who am I to judge? And when the movie finally pivots back to its A-plot, and the extremely chilly, extremely Northern European Professor Binnie begins to warm, as it were, to her magical black wish-granter, you half expect Said himself to pop up and start offering a running commentary on the West's sexual fantasies about the non-Western world. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the conservative Catholicism crisis. Topics discussed Catholicism in Africa, the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, and the Pope Benedict XVI's pontificate's administrative failures. It also offers information on the John Paul II-era Catholicism and mentions that liberal Catholi­cism envisions Catholicism.

EMILY the Criminal, a small, spikey, effective movie about a downwardly mobile Millennial artschool graduate turning to a life of crime, is a political and moral Rorschach test that gradually resolves itself into a meditation on the lure of sin. But choice by choice, crime by crime, it becomes clear that she's the agent, the dynamic figure, the armtwister, and she's becoming "Emily the Criminal" because she likes the life of crime. But watching Emily interact with the noncriminal world, you can also see her choosing to make her own life more difficult - alienating co-workers, torching interviews, and, by the way, what was that crime in college?. [Extracted from the article]

Film Just the Ticket ROSS DOUTHAT IT would disturb the entire ethos of this column if I were to become suddenly optimistic about the future of the movies. The nominal audience surrogate is Ladybug (a code name), played by Brad Pitt, a laid-back assassin who keeps up a patter of Californian philosophy as he tries to shed the bad luck that he complains has dogged him throughout his career. But at the risk of practicing the soft bigotry of low expectations, it's nice to see a bunch of movies even just trying to live up to the standards of Hollywood creativity that audiences could take for granted not so long ago. [Extracted from the article]

It's a movie about the movies, a commentary on celebrity and fame and reality TV. Nope, the third exercise in high-concept horror-suspense from Jordan Peele, is a polarizing movie, with reactions and reviews all over the place. So will your reaction to a certain nasty gratuitousness in the movie's grisly turn; I don't usually mind gore but there is an especially sickening quality to the Nope twist, instilling a nausea I couldn't quite shake when the movie turned back toward action spectacle. [Extracted from the article]

Film THE decline of Pixar can be charted with relative precision from its acquisition by Disney in 2006. The new Lightyear is, officially, the movie Andy loved, the franchise that produced the Lightyear toy and gave the plastic Buzz his confidence and brio. In the original Toy Story, Buzz (then voiced by Tim Allen) was presented as the main character in a space opera beloved by the pre-teen Andy, the owner of the movie's toys. [Extracted from the article]