The steps leading to the altar of Terrence Malick are practically a safety hazard, cluttered as they are with assorted offerings of frankincense and myrrh, bouquets draped with sashes that shout “Good job!” and perhaps a virgin sacrifice or two. Critics and certain moviegoers love him that much, which explains…
BERLIN — Riding from the Berlin-Tegel airport to my hotel on a crisp, sunny day last week, my cab passed the magnificent golden angel statue known as the Victory Column, a monument erected by the city in 1874 to commemorate assorted Prussian military victories of the day. But people all…
Jude Law, once so shiny-penny-clean and pretty — and with the kind of chin dimple that might have inspired Audrey Hepburn to ask, as she did of Cary Grant in Charade, “How do you shave in there?” — is only now reaching the age where we can call his face…
Where we come from defines us more than we even realize: That’s the idea implicit in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s somber, sturdily elegant drama Leviathan, in which a mechanic who has lived on the same parcel of land all his life — as his father and grandfather did before him — resists…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York who’s striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through…
There’s something bracingly honest about The Humbling, Barry Levinson’s movie about a 67-year-old Shakespearean actor, played by Al Pacino, who, after being struck with crippling anxiety, gets his mojo restored — some of it, anyway — by a manipulative muse (Greta Gerwig). Based on the 2009 Philip Roth novel of…
Anyone who loves Michael Mann movies, or even just the idea of Michael Mann movies, accepts that film style is a language and something more, a way of thinking, feeling, and looking that goes beyond basic plotting, dialogue, or character motivation. I can tell you pretty much everything that happens…
Without dropping spoilers right and left, how do I explain that I’m completely baffled by the Spierig Brothers’ retro-futuristic thriller Predestination? So the she who’s really a he is the earlier version of the he we meet later on and the later version of the she who shows up near…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he began making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and even the later Magnolia, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life like yeast springing…
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the Civil Rights Era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention…
“If everything were great, nothing would be great.” That line, from Scott Coffey’s smart and sweetly entertaining Adult World, is one of my favorite bits of movie dialogue from 2014, not least because it’s applicable to every movie genre — actually, every genre of everything. But in the movie world…
In Rupert Wyatt’s highball-cool reworking of Karel Reisz’s 1974 The Gambler, Mark Wahlberg does not play a cop, does not shoot bad guys with a gun, and does not spend considerable time shirtless (though we do see him sulking in a bathtub, and there’s a fleeting wet T-shirt moment, too)…
“If everything were great, nothing would be great.” That line, from Scott Coffey’s smart and sweetly entertaining Adult World, is one of my favorite bits of movie dialogue this year, not least because it’s applicable to every movie genre — actually, every genre of everything. But in the movie world…
Editor’s note: Sony has officially canceled the theatrical release of The Interview following terrorist threats against theaters, and the announcement that several major theater chains had opted not to exhibit the film. The following review was written before Sony pulled The Interview — and stands as a reminder that world-shaking…
For reasons that are perhaps understandable, stories about women finding themselves — or their voices or their inner courage or any number of things that are apparently very easy to mislay — are big business. But even if Cheryl Strayed’s hugely successful 2012 memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on…
Whatever it is Americans want out of life — and it’s not even something we can precisely define ourselves — it was nowhere in evidence on December 3, when a grand jury failed to indict the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner in July. We all know we live…
When we’re little, the things we want so badly in our miniaturized here-and-now are often impossible for grownups to understand. That’s certainly the case with the 9-year-old boy at the center of Venezuelan writer-director Mariana Rondón’s Bad Hair: Junior (Samuel Lange), a kid growing up in a rough housing complex…
The third-greatest scourge of the Earth, right after online comments sections and bedbugs, is the unfunny comedy sequel, which might be why you think you should skip Horrible Bosses 2. The miraculous surprise is that Horrible Bosses 2 isn’t terrible at all. It’s looser, breezier, and more confident than its…
If the universe is infinitely finite, an entity whose mystery is knowable only through an evolving progression of theories and equations, it’s nothing compared to a marriage. Every marriage or long-term partnership is knowable only to the people inside it — and sometimes not even then. The Theory of Everything…
When I was a kid in upstate New York, I’d hear Petula Clark’s “Downtown” on the radio — a song about the promise of glittering lights, “movie shows,” and all the excitement and dazzle adult life had to offer — and revel in the anywhere-but-hereness of it all. That’s not…
In the mid 1990s, self-appointed cultural gatekeepers used to wield Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Dumb and Dumber as proof of the deterioration of film artistry. Those people hadn’t, of course, actually bothered to see the movie, and thus had no sense of its peculiar, sweet-spirited, un-toilet-trained brilliance. Times have changed,…
