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2025

★★½ Added

By the end, what little individuality the film contains is entirely subsumed by the larger franchise. De Armas even ends up dressed in John Wick chic before the credits roll. But rather than playing like an organic character choice, it resembles flimsy cosplay — an unfortunate metaphor for Ballerina as a whole...

Read more at Mashable: mashable.com/article/ballerina-john-wick-review-ana-de-armas

2025

★★★★ Added

From Cannes 2025:

The history of the Cannes Film Festival is underscored by a sense of rebellion. After all, its creation in 1939 was in response to Mussolini’s undue influence over the Venice Film Festival. Whether or not Cannes retains this righteous stature today is a matter of debate. A glance at this year’s lineup might yield an affirmative response, especially since the festival’s coveted trophy—the Palme d’Or, or the Golden Palm—was awarded to Iranian dissident director Jafar Panahi for…

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2025

★★★★ Added

From Cannes 2025:

As its title suggests: there’s a sense of finality to Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, for better or worse. The eighth (and by far longest) entry in the Tom Cruise spy saga sees the methodology of four-time M:I director Christopher McQuarrie finally hitting a wall. He and Cruise are known for laying tracks directly in front of their charging production train, which results, in this case, in a strange and often disted film that stands apart…

2025

★★★★ Added

There are two kinds of messy big-budget movies, and as of 2025, Ryan Coogler has made them both. There’s the Marvel kind (seen in Coogler’s Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), where directorial vision comes second to the studio machine, and to shared-universe requirements, VFX constraints, notes from audience test screenings, and a restrictive house style. And then there’s the Sinners kind, where no matter the studio process, the result is stamped with the artist’s signature through and through.…

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