Charlize Theron continues her ascent to the throne of Ultimate Action-Movie Hero Badass in The Old Guard, following her star turns in powerhouse action films like Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde. This time out finds Theron sharing her stunt-heavy, fight scene bravura with an ensemble of lesser known, but equally entertaining, actors. The Old Guard is a graphic novel adaptation that overcomes a familiar setup to deliver an energetic, exciting story that finds a way to make its seemingly invincible characters vulnerable. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood packs her movie with several competing aesthetics, and she’s mostly successful in getting them all to work in harmony.
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The contemplative, roving camera of Terrence Malick has been loosed upon the breathtaking beauty of Europe. But the grandeur of the sweeping vistas, open fields, and European architecture comes at a price. Malick’s film A Hidden Life begins in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II and ends in 1943, well before the horrors of that conflict ended. We see little of the war’s devastation, though, because A Hidden Life focuses on historical figure Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian man who refused to fight in Hitler’s army. The picture is a meditation on the price of resistance, for both Franz and those closest to him. It also wrestles with religion and draws parallels between the fervor of the German and Austrian people for Hitler’s cause and America’s current political climate. A Hidden Life does all this in Malick’s inimitable, transcendent elliptical style.
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