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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Boston Strangler (2023) |
Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 21, 2023
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Champions (2023) |
Champions is a forward-thinking film masquerading as a deeply conventional one. We can say we’ve seen it all before—but when, and where? - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 10, 2023
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Blueback (2022) |
Manages to be pensive and breezy at once, a reflection on the way those who raise us sometimes impart their most noble values to us even as they’re driving us crazy—and their little ways of annoying us are often the things we miss most when they’re gone. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Mar 03, 2023
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Creed III (2023) |
As both actor and director, Jordan pulls off some fancy footwork in Creed III. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 25, 2023
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Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023) |
The mere presence of Elba’s Luther, with his haunted gaze, his voice as plush as the finest antique Persian carpet, is enough to keep The Fallen Sun from sinking. On him, troubled in tweed is a good look. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 25, 2023
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Emily (2022) |
Paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 17, 2023
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Magic Mike's Last Dance (2023) |
After that first 20 minutes or so, the picture has the clumsiness of a muffed backflip, and the letdown is hard to get over. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 08, 2023
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80 for Brady (2023) |
80 for Brady is brassy, ridiculous, and shameless. It’s also irresistible, maybe because watching older ladies having fun is almost embarrassingly seductive. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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True Spirit (2023) |
True Spirit makes freedom on the high seas look like fun, a far cry from staring at a screen in your bedroom, waiting for your life to begin. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 03, 2023
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Knock at the Cabin (2023) |
Even by Shyamalan’s usual standard of reminding us that he’s a thinker of deep thoughts as well as an entertainer, the result is cumbersomely preachy. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Feb 02, 2023
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One Fine Morning (2022) |
This is a big movie served up in a surprisingly small, intimate package. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 28, 2023
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You Hurt My Feelings (2023) |
It’s both smart and entertaining. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 27, 2023
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Cat Person (2023) |
Takes everything that was admirable, or even just compelling, about Roupenian’s story and spins it into a scrambled, overloaded mess. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 24, 2023
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When You Finish Saving the World (2022) |
Gentle, interwoven tensions... hold When You Finish Saving the World together, albeit just barely. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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You People (2023) |
You People stretches hard to make its points, but for the most part it’s terminally safe. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Jan 20, 2023
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The Pale Blue Eye (2022) |
Maybe, in truth, it never really does get going. But the story’s stately pace is part of the attraction, and perhaps key to its pleasurably somber tone. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 26, 2022
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Corsage (2022) |
Kreutzer gives Empress Elisabeth—often referred to, with casual affection, as Sisi—the sympathetic, imaginative and offbeat dream biography she deserves. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 26, 2022
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No Bears (2022) |
There’s no way to watch this film without feeling mournful, or fearing for the man who made it. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 26, 2022
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Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical (2022) |
This is a story about the family you choose, versus the one you were born into. And for some people, the chosen family is the one that makes all the difference. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 26, 2022
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Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022) |
It manages, even while being unapologetically entertaining, to feel like an honest reckoning with all the things we didn’t want to know about Houston at her fame’s height. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 26, 2022
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Babylon (2022) |
Babylon is a manic sprawl that only pretends to celebrate cinema. It’s really about prurience, dumb sensation, self-congratulation and willful ignorance of history. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 16, 2022
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Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) |
The Way of Water is the wave of the future, rolling in whether you like it or not. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 13, 2022
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Empire of Light (2022) |
Empire of Light spells out lots of things that it might have conveyed with a glance, or a line of understated dialogue. It stumbles under the weight of its intentions, and not even its majestic setting can save it. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 10, 2022
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Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) |
Roughly two-thirds in, the movie begins to feel a bit cluttered and unwieldy. But it’s a pure vision nonetheless—del Toro’s fingerprints are clearly visible in this painstakingly carved creation. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 09, 2022
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Lady Chatterley's Lover (2022) |
In a world where we always seem to be recoiling, where refusal and fear are always easier than saying yes, Clermont-Tonnerre and her actors strive for boldness. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Dec 02, 2022
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Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022) |
A breezy caper that mostly sustains its novelty, even if it stumbles a bit in the last third. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 22, 2022
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EO (2022) |
EO may be one of the greatest movies ever made about the spirit of animals, as much as we can know it. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 19, 2022
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Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022) |
Often, it’s exhausting. Iñárritu has a lot of thoughts and feelings, and he apparently sought to stuff them all into one movie. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 19, 2022
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She Said (2022) |
Regardless of this story’s ultimately explosive impact, She Said is simply a story of journalists at work. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 18, 2022
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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) |
Ticking boxes isn’t the same as pulling magic -- or even just insight -- from thin air... The sad reality is that the show must go on, and without [Chadwick Boseman], it’s just more of the same. Our job is to pretend it’s enough. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Nov 08, 2022
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Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues (2022) |
Even if you think you already know everything about Armstrong, Jenkins will show you more, or at least illuminate new facets of well-known facts. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 29, 2022
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Call Jane (2022) |
The film, despite its heavy subject, has a bright, vibrant energy. It’s not so much optimistic as galvanizing. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 28, 2022
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Aftersun (2022) |
The performances here are quiet marvels. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 22, 2022
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Ticket to Paradise (2022) |
If Clooney and Roberts are both wonderful actors, at this point they’re just not that good together, at least not in this setup. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 21, 2022
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Decision to Leave (2022) |
The film is a box of secret compartments; just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, one more panel springs open. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 15, 2022
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Rosaline (2022) |
The picture is frisky and casual; it doesn’t try to be something it’s not. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 15, 2022
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Till (2022) |
Till is an affirmation of just how much Emmett Till’s life mattered, and continues to matter long beyond his last breath. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 15, 2022
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Triangle of Sadness (2022) |
You can fully agree that most “haves” are dreadful, and that the “have nots” deserve much more out of life, and still be exhausted and bored by Triangle of Sadness and its quirky acidity. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 07, 2022
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The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) |
It doesn’t fully work, but it’s not a crime against humanity. And Efron carries the whole thing ably on his shoulders. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Oct 02, 2022
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God's Creatures (2022) |
It’s a chilly film but not a heartless one; sometimes the nature of forgiveness is captured best in a small sliver of light. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 30, 2022
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Bros (2022) |
What’s wonderful about Bros is how un-different it is. The bewilderment of early love, the insecurities, the confusion over what sex “means,” or doesn’t—all of that is universal, which is exactly the point. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 30, 2022
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On the Come Up (2022) |
On the Come Up is a thoughtful and generous-spirited entertainment, and a reminder of how hard it can be, when you’re young, to figure out who you really are. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 24, 2022
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A Jazzman's Blues (2022) |
Perry’s vision is welcome in a world where so few filmmakers will take a chance on making an old-fashioned melodrama, even one that also explores, as this one does, some painful historical underpinnings. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 23, 2022
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Moonage Daydream (2022) |
If nothing else, Moonage Daydream captures him as we’d like to remember him: dazzling, sensitive, full of questions—and in the end, as happy, probably, as a truly brilliant person can ever be. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 17, 2022
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The Woman King (2022) |
This is an action spectacle with a beating heart. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 16, 2022
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The Eternal Daughter (2022) |
The Eternal Daughter isn’t just a ghost story but a song, sung by a daughter to her mother across a small table at dinner, or across the space that remains when the people we love have left us. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 08, 2022
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Don't Worry Darling (2022) |
The biggest problem with Don’t Worry Darling is that it ends in the wrong place: This could have been a reasonably effective dystopian chiller, but it takes a sharp swerve into feminist triumph that feels patched-on and facile. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) |
Farrell brings extra layers of depth and mournfulness to the classic McDonagh pattern. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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The Whale (2022) |
Sometimes an actor can help minimize a director’s shortcomings, and that’s what Fraser does here. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 05, 2022
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Bones and All (2022) |
It’s so carefully made, and so lovely to look at, even at its grisliest, that it ends up seeming a little remote, rather than a movie that draws you close. Still, its actors give you something to watch every minute. - TIME Magazine
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| Posted Sep 03, 2022
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