Elle Stars Isabelle Huppert as a Woman Under the Verhoeven Influence

Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven has dedicated his career to sifting through trash to extract ugly truths. He’s a former math and physics student who decided movies make more sense, but it’s hard to picture him crunching numbers and plugging in formulas and dealing with absolute answers, as his proudly pugnacious…

Walkthrough for the Assassin’s Creed Movie: Don’t Go

The Assassin’s Creed video games are about skipping through tedious cut scenes set in the present so that you can vault into the past, through and over gorgeous recreations of the roofs and streets of medieval and Renaissance cities. Sometimes you chase floating feathers through Florence. Often, you’ll sneak behind…

Natalie Portman Thrills in Pablo Larraín’s Impeccable Biopic

In the pantheon of American First Ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy was no Eleanor Roosevelt. She didn’t push for policy, didn’t relinquish her pillbox hat to walk among the needy, didn’t travel to foreign countries as an ambassador and certainly didn’t advise her husband on matters of war. Jackie Kennedy’s role was…

Seven Films We Look Forward to Distracting Us in Early 2017

2017 looks like it won’t be an improvement over 2016, so here are some promising films — either reviewed or previewed — to distract you in the next three months. In keeping with the pessimism most of the country is feeling, we’re also considering “what could be bad” in the…

Goodbye, Ballers: The Miami Moments We’ll Miss in Season 3

Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and his HBO football comedy Ballers have decided to relocate for Season 3, ditching continued production in Miami in favor of a move to California. Hollywood has promised the show a $8.3 million TV tax incentive for making the move, as well as a few other bells and whistles the Sunshine State just couldn’t match.

“Get in There and Create”: Pablo Larraín on Jackie and Neruda

Pablo Larraín is having a good year. The Chilean director, Oscar-nominated a few years ago for his 2012 political drama No, has just released Jackie, featuring a striking Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination. He is also about to release Neruda, a complex,…

Melissa Anderson’s Top Films of 2016

In a profile early this year, the novelist Dana Spiotta told the New York Times, “That’s seductive, being paid attention to.” Several of the films below — those that seduced me — feature pivotal scenes, whether in diners, at picnic tables or at kitchen tables, of one character raptly listening…

Top 10 Films of 2016? Bilge Ebiri Says It Was More Like 20

I was fortunate enough this year to be at both Sundance and Cannes, so it was something like agony for me to watch the litany of critics and commentators who spent the summer and early fall complaining about the year in film — all while movies such as Manchester by…

L.A. Weekly Film Critic April Wolfe’s Top Horror Films of 2016

In this, the harrowing year of 2016, I could jump into the Oscars talk. I could pick groundbreaking films that reminded me time and again that movies are alive and more vital than ever, like the heartbreaking Moonlight, the soul-stirring Queen of Katwe, the force-of-goodness 13th, the subtle and sweet…

The Best TV of 2016

Controversial opinion: Lists are a great way to both organize and digest horrifically large amounts of information. And they’ve never been more relevant than this, the Lord’s year, 2016, in television. There’s just too damn much, and nobody could possibly watch it all — except maybe Scott Bakula on a…

Ho Ho Hokey: How I Learned to Love Hallmark Christmas Movies

Whenever I tell someone I’ve been binging on Hallmark Christmas movies all day, there’s a certain amount of apology involved. “I know, they’re the worst,” I’ll concede, before the other person has had a chance to say anything. “The one I watched this morning was a real winner.” Usually whomever…

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Is More Product Than Myth

The first thing to say about Rogue One is that it might be the most visually splendid Star Wars movie to date — with its mist-covered mountains, its tsunamis of dust and fire, its X-wing fighters blazing through rainswept nights. I’ve never been a big fan of director Gareth Edwards…

Miami-Made Film Moonlight Earns Six Golden Globe Nominations

The next step on Moonlight’s road to the Oscars played out this morning when the Golden Globes announced its 2017 nominations. The film, based on a play by Miami native Tarell Alvin McCraney and directed by fellow Miamian Barry Jenkins, earned six nods from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, including…

Moonlight Panel Revealed Jenkins’ and McCraney’s Process and Passion

As praise for the Miami-made film Moonlight continues to build, its filmmakers and actors gathered at Miami Beach Cinematheque Thursday for a local look inside its creation. Actors Alex Hibbert and Jaden Piner, playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, and director Barry Jenkins discussed the film in a Speaking in Cinema conversation led by Borscht Film Festival cofounder Lucas Leyva, resulting in one of the most revealing conversations about the film to date.