For a movie about a girl with pyrokinetic powers, “ Firestarter ” is lacking a certain spark.
This new adaptation of Stephen King’s 1980 novel is not scary or thrilling, nor is it emotionally resonant or particularly moving.
Early on in “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tom Cruise hops on his sleek motorcycle, wearing Aviator sunglasses and a leather jacket with patches, and speeds into a time machine.
“On the Count of Three” is marketed as a “darkly comic” movie. Well, there's dark comedy and there’s darker comedy, and then there's comedy like this — so dark that you wonder if the two words can realistically co-exist in one sentence.
Once a superhero franchise goes multiverse, it’s hard to go back.
No work of fiction ever needs permission to break the rules or push the boundaries of traditional storytelling, but the multiverse, at least as it’s been served up in recent Marvel movies, practically demands it.
“Happening,” Audrey Diwan's Golden Lion-winner at last year's Venice Film Festival, is set in 1963 France but the period detail isn't prominent.
“Memory" is an interesting title for the latest Liam Neeson thriller. Do you remember the last Liam Neeson thriller? Or the one before that? Who was it that got took in that one? It began getting hard to tell these films from one another years ago, and yet they've kept coming.
If “ Petite Maman ” left you feeling a little too good about mothers, daughters and empathy, Finland may just have the antidote in Hanna Bergholm’s “ Hatching,” a chilling critique of perfectionism wrapped up in a gruesome body horror.
We first meet the intriguing heroine of “Anaïs in Love,” appropriately enough, when she's rushing. The opening scene of the French romantic comedy has her running down a Paris street with a bouquet of flowers.
If you’re gonna face a jury for a crime you’ve already confessed to — and even explained how you did it — you’d better have something going for you besides a “not guilty” plea.
The real-life character of Britain's Kempton Bunton, an amiable sexagenarian taxi driver who was acquitted of stealing a national art treasure in 1961, definitely did.
Céline Sciamma’s “ Petite Maman ” couldn’t be more different in scope and scale from “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” There are no castles, or corsets or waves crashing up against craggy cliffs.
The first sign that not everyone in Robert Eggers' 10th-century Viking revenge tale “The Northman” has their priorities entirely straight comes early in the film, when the Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke) returns home to the North Atlantic kingdom of Hrafnsey after a year of fighting overseas.
Time always flew in J.K. Rowling's Wizarding World but it has lately seemed to catch up to the Potter pop cultural sensation. Those long lines outside bookstores are a long time ago now. The books stopped but the movies never did.
“ Navalny ” is so taut and suspenseful you’d think John le Carré had left behind a secret manuscript that’s only just coming to light now.
This Easter, Mark Wahlberg is offering us a gift as sweet as a box of Peeps or a chocolate rabbit — and just as nutritious.
“Father Stu” is a loving biopic of a one-time real-life hell-raising, blue-collar hustler who somehow becomes a white-collared Roman Catholic priest.
The fact that “ Sonic the Hedgehog 2 ” exists is not exactly a mystery.
The first film was a financial success for Paramount Pictures and by the year’s end would hold the distinction of being the No.
The human voice, a necessity in virtually any film, is barely existent and wholly secondary in “COW.” We hear only random bits of conversation, muffled and unimportant, from people we don’t know and don’t need to.
Of all the many things that go fast in Michael Bay's pedal-to-the-metal retro action thriller “Ambulance” — the speeding EMS van, the army of police cars trailing it, Bay's ever-swooping, whooshing camera — nothing goes by in more of a blur than the exposition.
Maybe it's a counter-reaction to our increasingly digital reality, but lately horror films have increasingly turned to primal pasts to resurrect the rituals and fears of folktale.
It's a strikingly global trend, spanning puritan New England ("The Witch"), rural Iceland (“Lamb”), North Dublin ("You Are Not My Mother") and pagan cults of Sweden ("Midsommar").
The latest hero from Marvel is hard to explain. He's a man and yet also a bat. No, not Batman. Let me try again: He's a daywalking vampire, but, no, not that cool cat Blade. This guy is good but also very bad.
The geniuses at NASA accidentally build the lunar module a little too small for an adult in “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood.” In Richard Linklater’s first foray into animation since “A Scanner Darkly,” a few fast-talking NASA men (Glen Powell and Zachary Levi) recruit an average local elementary school student, Stan, to test it out for them on a top secret mission to the Moon.
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is your standard multiverse martial arts movie about filing your taxes and midlife regret in which googly eyes, everything bagels and fanny packs play vital supporting roles and portals to parallel existences are opened not with a spell but with butt plugs and paper cuts.
“The Lost City” is the kind of charming, star-driven, action-adventure that makes moviemaking look easy and effortless from the outside. It’s hard to imagine a world in which you pair Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum as a romance novelist and her himbo cover model on a “Romancing the Stone”-esque journey not being enjoyable.
History is factual. History is chronological. History is linear. But memory? Memory is none of those things.
Memory is selective, memory is jumbled, memory travels in different directions. And so does “Mothering Sunday,” Eva Husson’s affecting and visually pleasing — if languorous — meditation on love and loss, based on a woman’s memory of an impactful day that reverberates through her long life.
You want ghosts? Check. How about doors inexplicably opening and closing, creepy moaning in dark corners, and sudden sickening swarms of maggots? Check, check and check.
In Houston 1979, a small film crew arrives to make a porn film in a rented cottage on a farm belonging to an aged couple, one of whom greets the producer at the door with a shotgun and — unaware of their cinematic ambitions — an order for “discretion.” What could possibly go wrong?
Meet Vic and Melinda Van Allen, the yin and yang of the country club circuit. He likes to brood; she likes to dance. He's a teetotaler; she's a lush. He rather likes monogamy; she likes to nuzzle other men in front of her husband.
Pathos and action are found in equal parts in “ The Adam Project,” the latest attempt by Netflix to create the kind of throwback blockbuster that you might have paid to see in movie theaters.
For better and worse, “Turning Red” is like no Pixar film before it.
The film, directed by Domee Shi, who made the lovely Oscar-winning short “Bao,” is the first Pixar movie directly solely by a woman.
A boy sees a pretty girl at a party and delivers a pick-up line for the ages. “If you don’t have anything to do tonight, how would you like to learn how to do the rhumba?” he asks. The girl is charmed.
The two features by the South Korean-born filmmaker and video essayist Kogonada – his auspicious debut “Columbus” and the new “After Yang” – are distinct for their richness in rare qualities.
Batman, never a day person, is plunged into perpetual night in Matt Reeves’ nocturnal, nihilist, neo-noir take on the Caped Crusader.
Reeves’ three-hour-long “The Batman” includes plenty of action, character introductions, gadgets and other various superhero accoutrement.
To say Naomi Watts is the only star in “The Desperate Hour” is a little misleading. She's pretty much the only person in the film, that's true. But you could make the case that she has a co-star in her iPhone.
Joe Wright is at his best when he’s making movies about love. They may not always have a happy ending. In fact, they usually don’t. But truly romantic movies seem to be a rarer and rarer thing in contemporary cinema and, like Max Ophuls and Jacques Demy before him, Wright is almost peerless in his ability to make an audience swoon and suffer in maximalist splendor.
For anyone who found the band tensions that reverberate in “The Beatles: Get Back” too tame, the Foo Fighters have made a movie in which arguments over recording an album lead to a trail of dead bodies — and, no, this isn't Yoko's fault, either.
Et tu, pause button? I thought you were my friend.
Anticipating the inevitable guts and gore and murderous mayhem, I screened Netflix’s new “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” on my TV in broad daylight, with sunlight streaming through the windows and the comforting din of traffic below, and with the remote in my hand throughout, ready to hit “pause” to delay the really bad stuff.
Something would have had to go very, very wrong for “ Dog ” not to work on a basic level. Pairing Channing Tatum, one of our most likable leading men, with a dog in a road trip two-hander is probably the closest you can get to a guaranteed win in Hollywood.
Goonies never say die, and neither do some of their storylines.
“Uncharted," a new movie based on the PlayStation video game, cribs heavily from adventures like “The Goonies” and its holy grail, “Indiana Jones." It's the kind of movie that wears its influences proudly on its sleeve to perhaps enlarge itself by those associations.
About halfway through “Blacklight,” Liam Neeson’s 54,796th action movie, someone asks his character how long he’s been doing his job.
Jennifer Lopez is very good at being very famous.
That might sound more like a circumstance and not a rarified skill, but that’s just because she’d never let you see the work behind it. The same goes for her competence as a romantic comedy heroine.
Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie adaptation “Death on the Nile” begins with a flashback to the trenches of World War I before shifting to 1930s London two decades later, but that’s nothing compared to the time that's passed since Branagh's preceding 2017 whodunit “Murder on the Orient Express.”
Some people might look up at the moon and admire its glowing and desolate beauty. Director Roland Emmerich apparently sees a constructed hollow orb that may have been built by aliens. Some of us will never gaze up at it the same after seeing his mind-blowing “Moonfall.”
There is a fallacy of youthful restlessness that’s easy to forget when it’s mostly in the rearview mirror: It’s possible to both not know what you want while also being pretty sure of what you don’t.
Pity those in charge of COVID-19 protocols on “Jackass Forever.”
Imagine, just for starters, the challenges of monitoring the health of participants in something called the “Vomitron.” I could describe this particular contraption of Johnny Knoxville’s but the name pretty much speaks for itself.
At one point in “The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild,” the twin heroes find themselves in a familiar place and voice what many in the audience are quietly thinking.
A train ride from Moscow to the arctic port city of Murmansk would not seem like the most likely setting for anything as warm as Finnish filmmaker Juho Kuosmanen's “Compartment No.
A man sits on the edge of an infinity pool contemplating his existence in Michel Franco’s “ Sundown.” It’s one of many such ennui-laden images, though the settings get less luxurious as we go along on this strange journey with Neil, a man who decides to drop out of his own life suddenly and with no explanation.
Once upon a time there was a film that didn't know what it was. A romantic comedy? Perhaps. A period drama? A fairy tale? A tween fantasy mixed with royal intrigue? No matter. Producers threw a lot of cash at the film and filled it with movie stars.
In the new Netflix movie “ The Royal Treatment,” the chief of staff for the prince of a fictional European country accidentally calls a run-down salon in the Bronx to schedule a haircut for His Royal Highness, Prince Thomas.