In Rachel Lambert’s dreamlike indie “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” our heroine’s life is on mute: visually, sonically and emotionally. An office worker in a coastal Ore...
Words like “important” and “vital” are thrown around possibly a little too much in film criticism. It’s not that we don’t mean it — it’s just that sometimes we (ok, I) ca...
With war raging in Ukraine and U.S.-Russia relations below freezing, the Cold War movie may be alive, again, too.
After decades when fears of mutual destruction and nucl...
The first “Mean Girls,” that compulsively watchable high-school based social satire by Tina Fey, came out in 2004. The Broadway musical opened in 2018. Now it’s 2024, and...
Secret agents and murderous assassins seem to lurk in increasingly mundane places.
Remember “The Accountant” with Ben Affleck? Or “The Tax Collector” with Shia LaBeouf? ...
“Freud's Last Session,” starring Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, adds to a string of sterling late-chapter performances by the 86-year-old actor. He was the soul of “Ar...
Director George Clooney both begins and ends “The Boys in the Boat” on a sun-dappled lake. It’s a seductive sight, calm and soothing, and aptly reflects the ethos of a fi...
Napoleon Bonaparte. Leonard Bernstein. Willy Wonka. Aquaman — there are a ton of Guy Movie Heroes out there as 2023 ends. And yet up zooms another — in “Ferrari.”
Direct...
Exuberant performances from a cast led by Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and Danielle Brooks breathe life into Blitz Bazawule’s stirring “The Color Purple,” adapted f...
Filmmaker Sean Durkin is interested in exploring the dynamics of dysfunctional families, particularly ones with imposing, controlling or otherwise distrustful father figu...
Illumination, maker of “Despicable Me,” “Sing” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” has built its animation empire by mostly staying close to a child-like outlook. Illumina...
It is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter’s insatiable libido...
The original 1971 “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops. But never has there been ...
Imagine that it's close to midnight and there's a knock at the door of your luxurious weekend rental home. A man is standing there, calmly apologizing. He says it's his h...
When Hayao Miyazaki's “The Boy and the Heron”The Boy and the Heron premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro sai...
Back in 1954, just nine years out from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese filmmaker Ishirō Honda and special effects designer Eiji Tsuburaya dreamed ...
In Beyoncé’s concert film, she describes her recent Renaissance World Tour as being run like a machine: From lighting to set design, the superstar had a hand in everythin...
For such a famed historical figure, Napoleon has made only fleeting appearances in movies since Abel Gance’s 1927 silent film.
Stanley Kubrick had grand designs for a Na...
Walt Disney Animation's "Wish" is stunning to look at with textured and rich watercolor-inspired animation and easter egg treasures for audiences nostalgic for the classi...
Two hours and 37 minutes is pretty long for a “ballad,” but you can’t call it “The Hunger Games: The Three-Cycle Opera of Songbirds and Snakes” now, can you?
Concision wa...
In “Next Goal Wins,” a soccer coach comes from far away to lead a hapless group of athletes. He's a fish-out-of-water type, ill-suited for the job, but rises to the occas...
It’s a noir staple to open with a bit of narration, but once the nameless hit-man protagonist of David Fincher’s “The Killer” starts gabbing, he doesn’t stop.
As Fincher...
The stakes feel immensely low in “The Marvels,” and it’s not because this is a movie that spends a fair amount of time following cats or has an out-of-nowhere musical num...
There’s a scene in the middle of “Priscilla,” Sofia Coppola’s biopic of Priscilla Presley, which contains a surreal detail that had to have been at least one of Coppola’s...
Nature provides much of the soundtrack to “ All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” a poised and occasionally transcendent debut from writer-director Raven Jackson.
The sounds of...
Just in time for Halloween comes “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” a video game adaptation with the potential treat of demented Chuck E. Cheese-like animatronic creatures runnin...
Alexander Payne brings audiences to a New England boarding school in 1970 in “ The Holdovers,” a textured, nostalgic and often funny piece about three lonely and mismatch...
In “Nyad,” there are two feats of perseverance on display. First, there is the ceaseless determination of Diane Nyad (Annette Bening) to accomplish a marathon swim from C...
There tends to be lots of fast talking and fast moving in Martin Scorsese films, often from shifty types trying to get away with something. Or sometimes, simply because t...
Of all the ways that a relationship can end, a fundamental disagreement about a work of art is in some ways extremely silly. And yet, a film or a book exposing an irrepar...
