For all his reputation as a capital-A Auteur, Todd Haynes has always demonstrated impressive stylistic versatility. The Sirkian pastiche of Far from Heaven is a far cry from the lo-fi expressionism of Poison, and the music video wonderland of Velvet Goldmine has relatively little in common with the fractured minimalism…
Like most of the better Marvel efforts, Thor: Ragnarok feels like the work of a unique sensibility instead of a huddle of brand managers. While the studio’s films demonstrated plenty of comic flair right from the start of its shared-universe experiment, with 2008’s Iron Man, recent efforts have veered too…
“This year we hunt big game. This year you get your first kill.” So says seasoned hunter Cal (Matt Bomer) to his teenage son David (Josh Wiggins), who’s arrived in rural Montana for his annual visit, and even those going in unfamiliar with the premise of Alex and Andrew Smith’s…
In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear — not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire — lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. The image returns a…
Adam Sandler’s core as a performer has always been his self-loathing. In his best comedies, he weaponizes it with humiliating ruthlessness. (In his worst ones, it wafts pathetically off him like the day-after stink of a drunkard.) Now, he’s given the performance of his life in Noah Baumbach’s free-spirited and…
We don’t actually see that many books in Ex Libris, Frederick Wiseman’s massive new film about the New York Public Library. “People think that [libraries are] just storage spaces for books,” one administrator observes, when in reality they’re “about people [who] want to get knowledge to them.” That’s a central…
The story goes that the stretch of snowy landscape at the end of the original cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was actually B-roll from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, slapped on by Scott at the last minute to help deliver the more upbeat ending his studio requested. Those final moments…
Just a little more than three months ago, Tom Cruise starred in a lifeless wannabe-blockbuster called The Mummy that made little use of his innate charisma (shut up, he still has some) or his star persona, turning him into an anonymous action hero. Now comes American Made, a picture that…
In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada’s directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can’t help but forgive the things it doesn’t. (Kogonada, by…
The original French title of Belgian director Joachim Lafosse’s latest domestic drama is L’economie du couple, which translates (awkwardly) as “The Economy of the Couple.” It’s understandable that a U.S. distributor would opt instead for the rather nondescript and bland After Love — who the hell wants to see a…
Aubrey Plaza is a national treasure, but the movies still haven’t figured out what to do with her. Ingrid Goes West comes close, though, with its twisted, of-the-moment tale of an Instagram stalker who infiltrates the personal life of a social media celebrity. But for all its many virtues, it…
There is a better, more touching movie hidden somewhere inside The Only Living Boy in New York, and you can often see it creeping in around the edges. It’s not to be found in the somewhat empty coming-of-age narrative at the film’s center, which follows Thomas (Callum Turner), a precocious,…
Taylor Sheridan isn’t afraid to embrace genre. His Wind River plays more like an unusually well-made episode of CSI: Wyoming than the highly anticipated directorial effort from the screenwriter of Hell or High Water (which may well have been last year’s best-written film). Set in the desolate, snow-covered Wind River…
At 5 p.m. Thursday, I became one of the first people in this country to see The Emoji Movie a second time. (Aside, obviously, from the folks who made it — though I’m not entirely sure that some of them actually bothered to see it all the way through once.)…
The nerve-racking war thriller Dunkirk is the movie Christopher Nolan’s entire career has been building up to, in ways that even he may not have realized. He’s taken the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 evacuation from France, early in World War II — a moment of heroism-in-defeat that has become an…
It must be nice being Luc Besson, stuck at the age of 14 for the past 44 years. Back when I was that age, in the late 1980s, Besson was among my favorite working filmmakers. I adored the earnest wonder of the deep-sea worlds of The Big Blue (1988) and…
Somehow, while we were worrying about superheroes and star destroyers and hot rods and whether Captain America could beat up Superman or whatever, the goddamned Planet of the Apes movies became the most vital and resonant big-budget film series in the contemporary movie firmament. And they did it with the…
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,…
A couple years into his supposed retirement, the 80-year-old Ken Loach showed up at Cannes with I, Daniel Blake and proceeded to win the Palme d’Or (his second, after 2006’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley). The film follows an aging carpenter (Dave Johns) with a heart problem and a…
The 2017 Cannes Film Festival wrapped up last Sunday with a slate of generally predictable (and perfectly worthwhile) awards. And while it may have been a somewhat lackluster year for the festival’s main competition, there were plenty of cinematic treasures to be found on the Croisette – even a couple…
If nothing else, Alien: Covenant is the most ambitious Alien film ever made. It’s almost as if Ridley Scott, foiled in his recent attempts at biblical epics, metaphysical dramas and thorny psychosexual thrillers, decided to revisit those genres under cover of a prized franchise sequel. That’s not to suggest that…
King Arthur is neither Guy Ritchie’s worst film nor his best, but it might well be his most frustrating. A compendium of all the things that make the British director so occasionally exciting and so often irritating, this new, hyper-stylized take on the Arthurian legends veers between genius and idiocy…
