Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man, from 2015, showed us a modern factory worker’s soiling experience of the post-industrial economy. Now A Woman’s Life begins on the Normandy coast in the middle of the 19th century but is no less concerned with francs and debts, with how lives get…
America is going to hate this movie. Doug Liman’s The Wall — whose title will forever demand that, when bringing up the film in conversation, you’ll have to say, “No, the other Wall” — is a mean little thriller set in our desert wars, and its only American soldiers are…
“You can’t describe music with words,” the great Sonny Rollins observes in John Scheinfeld’s survey-course-brisk docu-dip into the art and life of John Coltrane. As if seeking to prove Rollins right, Scheinfeld’s interviewees hold themselves to generalities: “His sound is stunning,” observes appreciator-in-chief Bill Clinton, who adds, unilluminatingly, that it…
It’s easy to giggle at The Circle, the movie, just as it’s easy giggle sometimes at Dave Eggers, whose novel is the film’s source. James Ponsoldt’s adaptation (co-written with Eggers) is, like Eggers’ books, nakedly earnest, engaged with nothing less but The State of Things Now, more smart than its…
Twice I’ve described Kitty Green’s curious, alienating docu-whatzit Casting JonBenet to friends, and twice I’ve been asked, with surprising heat, “Why?” and “What’s the point?” So, this time, before we get into the specifics of what this documentary actually documents, let’s take a moment to consider what the film isn’t…
Terry George’s The Promise has the rare good fortune of turning up in theaters just weeks after another film showed how necessary a movie like this is. The second star-driven war-adventure film of 2017 to set a cross-cultural love triangle against the horror of the Armenian Genocide, The Promise would…
First things first. The new Mystery Science Theater 3000, that basic-cable and UHF puppet show that was above all else a treatise about what it was like to grow up on basic cable and UHF, is a cheery, companionable continuation, an almost business-as-usual new season Kickstarted and Netflixed that Febreezes…
Witherspoon is a marvel, hilarious and exasperating.
It’s the take as old as time. Yes, Beauty and the Beast’s love story can be read as a tale of abuse and brainwashing, of a woman imprisoned by a tyrant until she starts chatting with the table settings — and then, as seasons pass, chastising herself in song for…
Let’s say you had to make up a list of historical moments that might serve as grand backdrops for sweeping, old-fashioned, Hollywood-style romantic dramas. How high would you rank the Armenian Genocide? How high would you rank any genocide? Watching Hotel Rwanda, you probably never hoped that, amid the carnage,…
The movies never get the Midwest right. When, onscreen, have you seen white people at the grocery store mouth that shy, apologetic “oop” noise every time someone walks close enough that they feel they must shift out of the way? Or a father lecturing his children about the greatness of…
How could this not work? Table 19 boasts the right premise and a top-shelf cast: Anna Kendrick, Stephen Merchant, June Squibb, Craig Robinson and the great Lisa Kudrow as the randos consigned to a wedding reception’s least choice table, the one way in the back by the bathrooms. Mostly strangers…
It’s thematically fitting that Henry Phillips’ slight, prickling Punching Henry hits theaters just weeks after The Comedian, a bloated Robert De Niro exercise also about a difficult stand-up comic grinding through bad gigs and insulting meetings with TV suits — and accidentally starring in viral videos. The Comedian was about…
Don’t hold it against Martin Zandvliet’s land-mine drama that its English title is the dopiest movie-title pun since John Singleton’s Poetic Justice. That film concerned a poet named Justice; Land of Mine a land of mines. Called Under Sandet in the original Danish — roughly Under the Sand — Zandvliet’s…
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is the most trenchant studio release in years, a slow-building, often hilarious horror thriller built upon a dead-serious idea: that a black man walking alone through white suburbs is in as much danger as any slasher-flick teenager. Peele opens with that image, showing us, in a…
In October of last year, in southwestern Kansas, three members of a militia called “The Crusaders” were arrested and charged with planning to blow up an apartment complex in tiny Garden City housing 120 Somali immigrants. According to Tom Beall, the Acting U.S. State’s Attorney, one defendant had said that…
Quick, name an Archie Andrews personality trait. Yes, he’s red-headed and red-blooded, a horndog naïf with hashtag sideburns who is forever battled over by beauties he can’t be bothered to get anywhere with. But beyond that — who is he? Sometimes he’s in a sugar-sweet pop combo. Sometimes he tools…
Despite his reputation, M. Night Shyamalan has never lived and died by the twist. His best films, such as Unbreakable or even last year’s cheerily nasty wicked-grandparents thriller The Visit, work first as accomplished, emotionally engaging suspense. What’s most memorable about them isn’t the final-act revelations or even the quietly…
Like its subject, the man who took McDonald’s from a single burger shop to a globe-straddling child-fattener, John Lee Hancock’s The Founder can’t stop selling. The first fast-food kitchen, set up in 1953 by the solemn McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, gets celebrated here as rousingly as John Glenn’s first…
Almost all of the history of American movies flows into Steven Spielberg, and the movies that have come since can’t help but be in response. As a storyteller and as a cultural figure, his closest precedent isn’t John Ford or David Lean, but Dickens, another age’s popular titan, beloved more…
Parents be warned: J. A. Bayona and Patrick Ness’ kid-meets-beast coming-of-age fantasy is a reclamation of fairy stories from the reassuring fiction of happily ever after. In a lineup of holiday releases — or, soon, a streaming queue — this tale of a bullied Irish boy whose best friend is…
There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…
