There’s a kitchen-sink full of Serious Drama Cliches in the new Justin Timberlake film “Palmer,” about a high school football star turned convict who must help the young gender fluid boy with the...
The actors Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth have been friends for 20 years and that is plainly evident watching them play longtime lovers in the wrenchingly beautiful film “Supernova.”
Even before the pandemic, “The Little Things” would have been a throwback.
Star-laden thrillers, with studio scale and high-priced craft, are one of those genres that's been mostly squeezed...
Ramin Bahrani, the Iranian-American filmmaker, started out small, with the simple story of a pushcart vendor, a Pakistani immigrant selling coffee and doughnuts in New York, in 2005’s “Man Push...
Border tensions are boiled down to two families in “ No Man’s Land,” an uneven independent thriller with some redeeming qualities. Its heart, and homages to classic Westerns, are in the right...
Doug Liman's “Locked Down,” one of the first and most ambitious films to be conceived and shot during the pandemic, is, like our own quarantine experiences, erratic, a little absurd and...
The potential pitfalls of a movie that brings together Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown for a night on February 25, 1964, seem so numerous, so prone to falling into caricature,...
Just before the outbreak of the World War II, a small-time archeologist was hired by a local woman to excavate her land. The thought was that it possibly contained some Viking remnants. But what...
There's an iconic photograph of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that was taken as he triumphantly boarded one of the first integrated buses in Montgomery, Alabama.
It’s hard to decide what’s most shocking in “The Dissident,” Bryan Fogel’s urgent, gripping new documentary about the horrific murder of Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Phyllida Lloyd's “Herself,” an Irish drama of spousal abuse set against Dublin's housing crisis, has some narrative weak spots but its foundation of resilience and heart is strong.
“ Pieces of a Woman ” begins with a tragedy. Martha (Vanessa Kirby) is expecting her first child with her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf). For a few minutes, we see them in the final stages of...
The latest cinematic rendering of “ Pinocchio, ” from Italian director Matteo Garrone, is informed not by the friendly 1940 Walt Disney retelling, but the original source material. Carlo Collodi’s...
Pete Docter's “Soul” features stairway-to-heaven visions of the afterlife, a pre-birth “before” realm where souls are glowing turquoise orbs and an in-between spiritual realm trafficked by some...
Tom Hanks rides a horse and blasts a six-shooter in his new film, “News of the World.” Some of you might be thinking this must be his first cowboy role. To those, we respond: Have you forgotten...
It’s summertime in Harlem in 1957 when we get to know the beautiful souls at the center of “ Sylvie’s Love.” Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) works at the register of her father’s record store but dreams...
Is it a #MeToo-era revenge thriller? A 21st-century “Fatal Attraction”? A candy-colored feminist polemic, to strains of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? A black comedy? A comic tragedy?
The assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s estranged half-brother Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur’s airport in February of 2017, I’m embarrassed to say, was a blip on my radar. There was...
If you’re going to make a movie about wish fulfillment, 1980s America is about as good as you can do for a setting outside the Arabian Desert.
Can one movie make up for a year without musical theater, without jazz hands? Ryan Murphy's “The Prom” tries its damnedest to, but despite a promising opening and a spiritedness that makes “Glee”...
Ask any actor, Irish accents are notoriously tricky. Even natives can struggle with regional dialects. So it is a little alarming that the first voice you hear in “ Wild Mountain Thyme ” is...
Netflix is on a roll this year, with “Mank,”“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,”“Da 5 Bloods” and “The Trial of the Chicago 7” all garnering Oscar buzz. Well, hold onto your spacesuits for the latest —...
When it's at its best, “I'm Your Woman” feels like you've slipped through a trap door, revealing a hidden pathway in an old genre apparatus. Everything looks familiar — this is a '70s-set crime...
’Tis the season of great Aubrey Plaza performances, apparently. The “Parks and Recreation” and “Legion” alum has been long overdue for a breakout film role, something fitting of her wide-ranging...
It's a demonstrably difficult task to find a comic screen partner worthy of standing opposite Melissa McCarthy, so you have to appreciate “Superintelligence" for throwing in the towel.
Who we are with our parents and who we are in a romantic relationship can seem like different people.
For Harper (Mackenzie Davis), a newspaper reporter living a nice adult life in...
Chadwick Boseman surges onto the screen as fast-talking trumpeter Levee in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” like a man on an electrified tightrope -- balancing precariously between hope and cynicism,...
Remember “The Croods”? It’s understandable if the answer is a “sure, kinda?” The 2013 animated film about a cave family in a fictional prehistoric era featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage, Emma...
Dolly Parton's “ Christmas on the Square,” the newest addition to Netflix’s Christmas library, tests the limits of what one can reasonably categorize as a film. There is nothing cinematic in this...
A politicized healthcare crisis, horrifyingly unnecessary death, a crucial election. “Collective," a piercing documentary about corruption in Romania, may not directly concern current events but...
The film “Sound of Metal” starts with the uncomfortably loud noises of guitar feedback and ends two hours later with absolute silence. The trip through those extremes is a worthy one, if sometimes...
Three-quarters through “The Climb” comes a scene we've all come to expect in a romantic comedy: A wedding is interrupted by the best man who rushes into a church during a marriage ceremony and...
The new film “ Ammonite ” unearths the stories of two women buried by history: paleontologist Mary Anning, who in the 19th century made significant prehistoric fossil discoveries along the coast...
J.D. Vance's “Hillbilly Elegy,” an election-year explainer to liberal America about the white underclass that fueled Donald Trump's rise, has been reborn as blandly overbaked awards bait....
In one history of the movies, “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz might look like a footnote. The former playwright had a hand in many famous pictures, including “The Wizard of Oz,” but...
Superman, that boring lug, has thankfully flown the coop. Writer-director Thomas Bezucha's Western thriller “Let Him Go” reunites Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, who as the Kents were easily the...
When a small indie film uses the title “Jungleland,” it's natural to expect that Bruce Springsteen's famous tune will be heard. But, as with much of Max Winkler's moody, tender movie, the answer...
If it didn’t actually exist, “Holidate” would sound like one of those fake movies within a movie. A couple of attractive singles decide on a low-stakes, no-commitment arrangement to be each...
More than a few Halloweens ago — two dozen to be exact — came a film that looked like a treat but ended up as a trick.
“The Craft” was about four teenage witches who eventually turned their...
In Remi Weekes’ “His House,” Bol (Sopé Dìrísù) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) have fled war in South Sudan only to find new horrors lurking in English shadows.
It’s asking for trouble remaking Hitchcock, but with “Rebecca” you might be able to see a sliver of an opening. It’s justly revered as a ghostly Gothic masterpiece and the only film of Hitch's to...
No matter how you cut it, “ The Witches ” is a really disturbing tale. Not that one should expect anything else from Roald Dahl, but for some reason this story about a group of grotesquely...
Since Sacha Baron Cohen first appeared as his Kazakh journalist on “Da Ali G Show,” Borat Sagdiyev has been remarkably consistent. The accent is the same. The gray suit is still rumpled. “Nahce”...
The acclaimed animator behind such powerful figures as Ariel, Aladdin, Tarzan and Rapunzel has a new heroine and she's going further than any of his creations — the moon.
If anyone was born to make a film about the infamous federal trial surrounding the protests outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, it’s Aaron Sorkin.
Liam Neeson, we've been told, has a particular set of skills. One of those skills apparently is picking some movies that stink.
“Honest Thief,” co-written and directed by Mark Williams, is...
You would assume a college comedy with the unprintable title of “S—-house” to be another sad, low-brow retread of “Animal House.” You would almost bet on it. But 22-year-old Cooper Raiff's is not...
“I'm illegal,” says Rosario “Rose” Garcia (Eva Noblezada), a Filipina living undocumented in Texas, in Diane Paragas' “Yellow Rose.” The way she says it is meant, as it is, to sound ridiculous....