Arts & Culture

Despite the bright cinematography, there’s something quaint and comforting about this film and its brand of old-fashioned storytelling …

Why is Mel Gibson in the holiday family comedy Daddy’s Home 2? When Gibson’s relentlessly bloody, morally incoherent 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge inexplicably became a critical darling, I watched in horror at the love and attention lavished on the director. In what world were we living where, when Gibson’s name…

Over six episodes crafted with the rich complexity of the novel, “celebrated murderess” Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon), tells her own story, Scheherazade-style, to a doctor (Edward Holcroft) with the power to arrange for her pardon

In the first episode of Comedy Central’s new nightly satirical late-night series The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, the host explains why he jumped ship from The Daily Show, where he’d been a correspondent since 2015. The Jordan Klepper who cocked his eyebrow through Daily Show field segments in a perfect…

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, BPM (Beats Per Minute), French director Robin Campillo’s stylized, moving drama of AIDS activism and love, sometimes feels like several films at once. It follows the activities of ACT UP Paris in the early 1990s, and for much…

One year, back in the early 1990s, an uncle of mine didn’t show up to our family Christmas. I was only 10 and didn’t understand his sudden departure and why nobody would speak of it. A year later, I was at his funeral. He was a playwright and actor in…

Among the most savage and surreal of Italian comedies, starring one of the country’s biggest stars and directed by one of its legendary filmmakers, Vittorio De Sica’s Il Boom barely made a ripple when first released, in 1963. It sank so deeply that it’s only now getting a proper release…

Wonderstruck is a film about children. It’s a film about being different in a world that doesn’t quite understand you. It’s about silent cinema and ’70s cinema. It’s about deafness and how it changes your world. All in all, it’s a pretty queer film.

Much of the thrill of big-ticket theater comes from the simple truth of presence: You in the audience are watching the best in the world do what they do right there in front of you, in real time. In an intimate moment, you can sense or even share their metabolism,…

My Friend Dahmer, from a graphic memoir of the same name by the pseudonymous Derf Backderf, is a kind of coming-of-age tale that dissects a troubled kid’s descent into murder. Backderf was a high-school pal of the boy who would grow up to become the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey…

Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this past May, probably says more about the times we’re living in than any other film you’re likely to see this year. And yet the beauty of the movie is that everybody will have their own ideas about what,…