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Stephanie Zacharek
Tomatometer-approved critic
10 Favorites (Always Subject to Change): The Wild Bunch, Irma Vep, The Right Stuff, Blowout, Top Hat, The Godfather Part II, A Hard Day's Night, Breathless, Before Sunrise, L'Atalante
Brooklyn, NY, US
http://villagevoice.com/movies
Movies reviews only
| Rating | T-Meter | Title | Year | Review |
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Civil War (2024) |
Civil War is both a more ambitious picture and an act of grim entertainment. But it’s also sodden with its own importance, as if it thinks it’s saying something truly important -- something we don’t already know -- about the real America. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Apr 15, 2024
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Sasquatch Sunset (2024) |
The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch are like you and me. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Apr 15, 2024
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Monkey Man (2024) |
Dev Patel tries too hard, and for too much, in his directorial debut, but he's compelling enough to make you believe almost anything. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Apr 08, 2024
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Wicked Little Letters (2023) |
It may have been conceived as the kind of classy-but-ribald entertainment that might lure older moviegoers back to theaters. But insulting their intelligence probably isn’t the way to go. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Apr 03, 2024
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La Chimera (2023) |
O’Connor’s Arthur, the drifting soul at the center of this story, is our only true guide. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Apr 03, 2024
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Road House (2024) |
Road House plays just fine at home, but to see it in theaters, with a respectfully rowdy group of moviegoers, would have been a rare and perfect pleasure. This is a big, missed opportunity played out small. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 28, 2024
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Immaculate (2024) |
The movie’s shockeroo ending made me wince, and it made me laugh. It’s bad-gal blasphemy of the highest order. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 28, 2024
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Irish Wish (2024) |
[Lohan] plays Maddie as someone for whom you want the best. And sometimes that’s all you need a romantic-comedy heroine to be. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Spaceman (2024) |
It lifts off from a promising premise only to wobble out of orbit in the finish—but even so, it’s satisfying to watch these actors at work, fully committed to the strange, alienating world their characters are stuck in. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 05, 2024
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Drive-Away Dolls (2024) |
Nearly every note of this alleged romp rings false—except for the presence of one actor, a performer who seems to have been air-dropped from a better, much groovier movie. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 26, 2024
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The Taste of Things (2023) |
A movie that gives you back something you didn’t realize you’d lost, one that might even make you forget what year you’re living in. Its pleasures run quiet and deep. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 16, 2024
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Tótem (2023) |
Avilés shows family life as a kind of net, contracting and expanding according to the whims and needs of the people caught up in it. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 06, 2024
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Mean Girls (2024) |
Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 13, 2024
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Lift (2024) |
You can’t ask for more from a winter diversion—even if you wouldn’t wish for less. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 13, 2024
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The Color Purple (2023) |
The movie is lively and fun, without betraying the heavy undertones of some of its subject matter. It’s a reclamation, but a buoyant rather than somber one. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 31, 2023
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Other People's Children (2022) |
Efira may be as radiant as a Botticelli angel, but it's her no-nonsense directness that gets you. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 18, 2023
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Perfect Days (2023) |
There’s something inexplicably Wenders-like about it; he’s a filmmaker who looks for joy in the corners, and finds it. His lead actor is the perfect partner here. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 18, 2023
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Wonka (2023) |
Wonka is carefully calibrated to bring joy. But do we want our joy to be something capable of being manipulated with buttons and knobs, with grand but somehow flat-looking sets? - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 18, 2023
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American Fiction (2023) |
Monk is perfect the way he is, especially as Wright plays him. Watching this performance makes American Fiction a complex, sometimes discomfiting pleasure. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 18, 2023
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Revoir Paris (2022) |
Without preciousness or platitudes, Winocour and Efira plumb the stark and sometimes painful truth of what it means to commit to the world of the living. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 11, 2023
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) |
Scorsese has made a somber, poetic adaptation of David Grann’s account of how a group of greedy white men systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation in early 1920s Oklahoma. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 11, 2023
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Napoleon (2023) |
Even with all its flaws tallied and noted like battlefield casualties, there’s still something mildly compelling about it. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 27, 2023
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Fallen Leaves (2023) |
Kaurismäki works magic with understatement, especially in Fallen Leaves, possibly his greatest film. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 27, 2023
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The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023) |
It’s really just a tired rehash, albeit an extravagant one, this time with less appealing characters. As dystopias go, it’s a real bummer. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 27, 2023
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Saltburn (2023) |
It’s little wonder Oliver is enchanted by her. But the movie around her is too smug by half. Elsbeth deserves her own picture... - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 17, 2023
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What Happens Later (2023) |
The cloud of dissatisfaction I felt after watching it kept trying to reshape its molecules into a better movie, albeit one that could live only in my head. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 07, 2023
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The Holdovers (2023) |
Any warmth The Holdovers gives off is the premeditated kind, like those heating packets you tuck into your mittens on cold days. They’re designed to do the job in the moment. But nothing beats a real fire. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 03, 2023
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Anatomy of a Fall (2023) |
Triet’s approach to telling this story is decidedly tasteful; she layers one subtly intriguing detail atop another, like a muted accumulation of snowfall. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 19, 2023
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TAYLOR SWIFT | THE ERAS TOUR (2023) |
Swift’s command of her audience—and of the moment—is so complete that she instantaneously airbrushes every questionable filmmaking decision into oblivion. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 19, 2023
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Dicks: The Musical (2023) |
Dicks: The Musical confuses making comedy with inflicting it on an audience... - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 06, 2023
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Fair Play (2023) |
This workplace psycho-romance traces the resentments that can asphyxiate a couple when one partner’s career escalates as the other’s falters, and it does so in the service of a bigger picture. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 03, 2023
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Reptile (2023) |
Reptile just feels wayward and listless. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 26, 2023
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Cassandro (2023) |
As Bernal plays him, Cassandro is a hero for our dismal times, not just because he crashes through norms, but because he makes it look fun, even when it most certainly isn’t. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 26, 2023
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Origin (2023) |
DuVernay covers a lot of ground in a short span of time, and Ellis-Taylor's quiet forcefulness keeps the story going. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 06, 2023
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Priscilla (2023) |
Coppola draws us into the immediacy of young Priscilla’s desires, the way her friendship-turned-romance with one extremely lonely man represented, for a time, everything she wanted out of life. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 04, 2023
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The Killer (2023) |
Fincher seems to be having a great deal of fun with The Killer. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 03, 2023
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Poor Things (2023) |
It’s Lanthimos’ finest movie so far, a strange, gorgeous-looking picture that extends generosity both to its characters and the audience. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 03, 2023
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Dreamin' Wild (2022) |
It’s a lot to pack into a seemingly unassuming little movie, but Pohlad—who also directed 2014’s superb Love & Mercy—pulls it off. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 03, 2023
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Maestro (2023) |
Cooper plays Leonard Bernstein as a man who belonged to everybody—and still does. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 03, 2023
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Ferrari (2023) |
It’s a supple, elegant film, the kind of picture you’d expect from a vigorous craftsman like Mann, who hasn’t made a movie since the 2015 cybercrime thriller Black Hat. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Aug 31, 2023
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Bottoms (2023) |
If only Bottoms had more of that throwaway casualness. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Aug 25, 2023
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Passages (2023) |
This is a smart, lustrous film, and a bracingly honest one, the kind of movie that leaves you feeling both invigorated and a little blue.
- TIME Magazine
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| Posted Aug 17, 2023
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Heart of Stone (2023) |
Heart of Stone is a Mission: Impossible wannabe that mostly misses. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Aug 17, 2023
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Oppenheimer (2023) |
Either despite its intense craft or because of it, Oppenheimer works. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 19, 2023
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Barbie (2023) |
The things that are good about Barbie end up being steamrollered by all the things this movie is trying so hard to be. Its playfulness is the arch kind. Barbie never lets us forget how clever it’s being, every exhausting minute. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 18, 2023
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) |
The story exists only as flimsy interstitial tissue between the Tom-centric stunts, but maybe that’s enough. Ostensibly greater movies have given us less. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jul 05, 2023
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Past Lives (2023) |
The movie ripples with the quiet melodrama of real life, the way big things often happen in the margins, and small things gradually come to mean the world. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jun 02, 2023
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Asteroid City (2023) |
Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is what happens when a filmmaker’s world of wonder and whimsy becomes a prison. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted May 24, 2023
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The Zone of Interest (2023) |
The Zone of Interest is possibly the least overtly traumatic film about the Holocaust ever made, yet it’s devastating in the quietest way. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted May 21, 2023
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May December (2023) |
May December could have more fire; it could be even more twisted. But it’s seductive enough to keep us following along, one betrayal after another. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted May 21, 2023
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