The Insult is a little pushy, sometimes even tough to swallow, but no more than actual geopolitics

The latest film, the long-delayed The Death Cure, opens with a train heist that suggests, at once, the Mad Max films, the Fast & Furious franchise, and The Wild Bunch by way of Young Guns by way of a Gap ad

When these performers get the chance to exchange dialogue, to react to each other rather than declaim the movie’s themes, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool rouses to life

Like Reinhardt playing that party in Thonon-les-Bains, on the border between France and Switzerland, Django director Etienne Comar refuses the limitations imposed on him

Any thinking person watching Downsizing is 10 steps ahead of Damon’s blinkered schlub, and watching him piece together the bare facts about how this future America works — and how our America works today — makes for a frustrating sit

The new one is bigger and dumber than the previous, a feat considering the relentless clatter of the 1995 iteration …

The Pitch Perfect films have offered an increasingly unpalatable blend of pop-song empowerment, rah-rah women’s friendship and broad gross-out comedy

As Ginny and her life unravel, Allen’s sympathy for her seems to dry up, and she becomes something like the villain of the piece

You’re right not to trust a film critic who calls a move stunning. But let me say this about Human Flow, the epic new documentary surveying the scope of the global refugee crisis, from Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei: It stunned me, in the truest sense of the word. Again and…

Francis Lee’s stark, striking God’s Own Country is one of several significant films this year to depict hard-edged men softening, opening up, finding the courage to admit that everything they need to get through this life isn’t already inside them. The protagonist, raw-eyed farm boy Johnny (Josh O’Connor), has inherited…

Hello Again tasks its cast with impassioned miming of a panoply of sex acts, the singers conjugating each other like verbs in foreign language class

It’s not enough that the sitting president will hate Rob Reiner’s LBJ, but that’s not nothing, either. Here’s a portrait of a resolutely unlovable vulgarian who, due to a cruel accident of history, ascends to the Oval Office. But it’s the distinctions that will sting: In the opening moments, a…

Something of a prank, a farewell, an art project, a buddy comedy, a vox populi tour of the French countryside, and an inquiry into memory and images and what it means to reveal our eyes to the world, Faces Places is a joyous lulu. It finds the great documentarian and…

The scenes that sting and linger in this uncommonly thoughtful and engrossing war drama are not its scenes of combat. They’re of efforts to stave off combat, of politicians and royalty trying to work out a deal to maintain neutrality, of parliaments dissolving and the radio blaring the news to…

America may be crumbling, but here’s at least one truth that might be cheering: They’ve finally figured out biopics. Ever since Walk Hard kicked its ass, that hokiest, flabbiest, most hilariously reductive of movies genres has become, like horror, the rare genre where the studios allow filmmakers to take risks,…

Spielberg premieres Oct. 7 on HBO. While the studios accuse critics and Rotten Tomatoes of killing the movie business, Steven Spielberg is happy to look right into the camera and say that Pauline Kael had his number. “She was right,” says the world’s most profitable director deep into Spielberg, Susan…

With its cast of Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, its original non-franchise source material, its adult concerns and utter lack of superheroics, Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us stands as the kind of movie that grown-ups I know often say they wish the studios would make — and then tend…

Lording over the colonies is all bore and bother for the queen in Stephen Frears’ sumptuous yet centerless Victoria & Abdul. The film dramatizes Queen Victoria’s spirited friendship with Abdul Karim, a charming clerk from northern India who — in this telling — jolts the Empress of India from her…

There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just spit it out. I spent the first 10 minutes of Stronger, David Gordon Green’s eventually potent drama of trauma and recovery, trying to work out whether star Jake Gyllenhaal was intending to suggest that the real-life Bostonian at the story’s…

The greatest surprise is the beauty. The gripping new Netflix documentary series Fire Chasers opens with visions of orange-and-black hell, of ash and apocalypse, of California homes and trees and horizons ablaze, of the sky itself now some jack-o’-lantern’s smile. The fire brightens the night, but the smoke shrouds both…

In one sense, Steven Spielberg’s 1977 UFO bliss-out, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is reprehensible. It is, after all, the story of a daydreamer dad (Richard Dreyfuss) who leaves his family for worlds unknown as he continually trades in one slender, luminous life companion for another: Teri Garr for…

Once more, into the brie — or, in this case, the Manchego. For the third time, now, for Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, it’s the feast as improv proving ground, the sumptuous meal as arena of competitive discernment: Who can better parse and parody the particularities of some beloved British…