Tag: 2016
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Exhaustively exhausted: Ben Affleck’s Live by Night
Has any topic been more exhaustively dramatized than Prohibition-era gangsters? Live by Night seems especially redundant so soon after HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, which covers a lot of the same ground: the Florida/Cuba liquor pipeline, the Irish/Italian mob conflict, the pivot to legal gambling, etc. The explanation being pretty simple: original novelist Denis Lehane also contributed…
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The Accountant is A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish
You can imagine the elevator pitch: “A Brilliant Mind meets Death Wish! Ben Affleck! Anna Kendrick!” Director Gavin O’Connor’s The Accountant flirts with righteous anger at big business financial corruption, but wimps out by ultimately fingering a single venal individual with a hired army of faceless mercenaries. There’s nothing engaging about a plot that can…