Flying High on The Ornithologist‘s Shape-Shifting Impieties

The Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues has called The Ornithologist, which follows a lone bird expert in a remote northern part of the country, an “adventure film.” It’s a genre he fantastically destabilizes to encompass martyrdom, transmigration of the soul, and wild revelers cavorting in Mirandese, a nearly extinct language…

The Big Sick Finds Stellar Comedy at Hospital Bedside

The pitch for The Big Sick might sound like a tacky weepie you’d have been afraid to watch on TV in the 1990s. But it’s hard to do justice to the balancing act that the creators of this singular comedy have achieved. Based on events in the life of star…

Direct From Queens, Spider-Man Finally Gets a Movie Worth Cheering

Most hero stories dating back to Achilles are fantasies of power, of the world made right through violence. What sets Spider-Man apart, outside his joyous bouncing through New York City, is that his stories are also fantasies of responsibility. Rather than just kick bad-guy ass, Spider-Man must forever fight to…

Murder and Dancing in July: Classic Films in Miami This Month

Stepping outside for more than 30 seconds is pretty much the most awful thing anyone can do in Miami this season. So why not sprint from your car to the cinema to stay in the safety of A/C and catch a good film? But instead of watching the parade of mediocre summer blockbusters, catch some classic films. Here’s where to find them.

Here’s All the TV Not to Miss This July

I hate July. It’s hot and there’s less TV. Nevertheless, she sweated through her bra and wrote this guide to what’s worth watching. Snowfall (FX), July 5. Justified’s Dave Andron teams up with director John Singleton for a drama about the start of the crack-cocaine epidemic in LA. Andron describes…

Thirteen Dissident Cate Blanchetts Rabble-Rouse Through Manifesto

Who knew Cate Blanchett wanted to be Tracey Ullman? That’s probably not the reaction director Julian Rosefeldt hopes will be stirred by this rigorous series of monologues, stitched together from more than 50 artistic and political manifestos and performed by Blanchett as 13 characters. But, like Ullman, Blanchett takes the…

Don’t Expect Naomi Watts’ Gypsy to Be Your New Erotic-Drama Addiction

Hollywood has many more outstanding actors than it does outstanding scripts. That’s the only way to explain Naomi Watts’ career, which launched stateside with a masterful twin performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Even with a pair of Oscar nominations, though, the actress has spent years languishing in Nondescript Mom…

Bong Joon-ho’s Mad Okja Fascinates but Doesn’t Always Work

In the run-up to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja was one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Then, after people had seen it, Okja turned out to be … one of the most mysterious titles in the Official Competition lineup. Now that it’s…

Popcorn Frights Reveals Full Lineup for Third Edition

Popcorn Frights has promised to be “bigger, bolder, and bloodier” in its third year, and the second wave of program announcements reflects that commitment. The festival has already revealed its homegrown horror section and a number of other new features. Now it says more than 40 film premieres from eight countries will hit Miami this August 11 through 17.

Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled Skims the Civil War Past

Ever since her feature debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), a dreamy, diaphanous tale about the mysteries of girlhood, Sofia Coppola has ranked among the finest distillers of mood (especially languor) and milieu. Those qualities abound in The Beguiled, her sixth film, an adaptation of Thomas Cullinan’s Civil War–set novel of…

Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver Makes the Car Chase Soar Again

Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is a remorselessly entertaining, impeccably assembled action-musical in which cars and people defy the laws of physics and common sense. They leap into gunfire and hop over hoods and careen down streets in perfect time to the beats of an unimpeachably cool soundtrack. It’s all absurd,…

Here’s What the New Transformers Movie Is Like

In the opening scene of Transformers: The Last Knight, we are presented with the spectacle of King Arthur and his knights locked in an existential battle for the survival of human civilization, even though we’re not really told who they’re fighting or why. No matter, because this after all is…

Your Queen to Be: RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Final Four Face Off

The world might feel like a schizophrenic hellscape where everyday you find yourself asking “Is this real life?” At least there is some comfort in knowing we still have RuPaul’s Drag Race. The Emmy award-winning drag queen reality competition jumped from boutique LGBTQ Viacom channel Logo TV to VH1 this…

Ana Lily Amirpour’s Bad Batch Offers a Timely, Inventive Apocalypse

Ana Lily Amirpour’s comic post-apocalyptic action-drama offers little explanation of what exactly its “bad batch” is, or how the members of its motley, unfortunate tribe of humans wound up banished to a desert wasteland. Instead, Amirpour lets her camera linger on a sign warning that everything beyond a 10-foot-high metal…

All Eyez on Me Is an Incredible Achievement

Everything you know about Tupac is likely wrong. Casual fans think of him as a loyal left coast soldier in hip-hop’s East Coast/West Coast war, but he actually had tremendous love and admiration for New York, where he was born and largely raised. Others cite his 1994 Manhattan shooting as…

Emmanuelle Devos Makes the So-So Thriller Moka Worth Watching

Though it’s a phlegmatic, sometimes stumbling thriller, Moka, directed and co-written by Frédéric Mermoud, still has its share of gripping suspense. These tense moments arise not from any plot machinations but from the anticipation of the next exquisitely calibrated response by Emmanuelle Devos, the film’s star, who appears in every…

A Holy Terror Rages Against Modernity in Russia’s Bracing The Student

In Kirill Serebrennikov’s tightly wound symbolic drama, a Russian high schooler starts spouting off biblical verses at the teachers, administrators and teens around him, decrying the hypocrisy of their ways and of a fallen world. You can feel the allegory coming from a mile away, but that doesn’t mean you…