In the nine years since she was first accused of and jailed for murder — then exculpated, only to be retried and found guilty again, and finally absolved — Amanda Knox has learned a thing or two about performance. “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing…,” the 21st century’s most…

Catherine Corsini’s lovely, sultry Summertime, a 1971-set tale about two women of different ages and class backgrounds who fall in love, celebrates erotic abandon but never loses its mind. Unlike Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Color (2013), France’s most notorious treatment of a sapphic sentimental education, Corsini’s movie, which…

Kindly allow this lengthy aside and conspiracy theorizing: I can’t start my review of Paul Feig’s redo of Ghostbusters without first mentioning the stupefying chaos that attended last Thursday evening’s press screening, the only one of two scheduled a half-hour apart in New York before the movie’s opening. This unprecedented…

Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, a 1900 novel about the depravities in all social strata written from the point of view of a servant named Célestine, has famously been adapted twice before, by two of cinema’s immortals. Benoît Jacquot’s uneven take on the material won’t challenge the stature…

Even when working from source material crafted by others, Terence Davies, like all singular filmmakers, imprints it with his DNA. At once solemn and lusty, Davies’ page-to-screen transfer of Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel beautifully conveys human fragility, our bodies and minds outmatched by the brute indifference of…

With the perfect timing of a deadpan comic and the keen observational skills of a zoologist, Athina Rachel Tsangari highlights just how bizarre the most banal of human activities can be. In Attenberg (2010), the filmmaker’s previous feature, walking itself is presented as a deranged means by which to move…

Never one to betray the courage of his convictions, Luca Guadagnino excels at the unrepentantly grandiose and ludicrous. The title alone of his previous narrative feature, I Am Love (2009), signaled operatic sweep and loony sincerity, qualities further exalted by the film’s visual ravishments and seductive voluptuousness. The Italian director’s…

As generic and impersonal as a new credit-card offer, Jodie Foster’s Money Monster is the latest big-studio production to try to cash in on populist outrage over Wall Street abuses and New Gilded Age inequality. There’s a lot of excitable talk about algorithms (or “algos”), the overuse of the term…

The effortless charisma of Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer, the headliners of the first two Barbershop movies (released in 2002 and 2004), helped keep those over-plotted comedies buoyant. Cube and Cedric are back as Calvin and Eddie in Barbershop: The Next Cut, but even their enormous appeal can’t rescue…

A she-wolf of Wall Street with a spiky ginger Suze Orman shag, Michelle Darnell, the anti-heroine of fitfully funny The Boss, is the latest of the Rabelaisian wonders played by Melissa McCarthy. The actress specializes in characters with indestructible bravado, no matter where they stand on the socioeconomic ladder; Michelle,…

This patchy comedy about a cossetted, obnoxious gymnast who has slid deep into sloth in the decade or so since her Olympic triumph gets an occasional laugh from the American ills it sends up: jingoism, the sports-industrial complex, home-schooling, fast-food gluttony. The scattershot jabs pepper the flaccid storyline of the…

The title of Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s strained dark comedy, in which the War in Afghanistan serves as the backdrop to an American woman’s self-actualizing journey, is the military phonetic-alphabet rendering of WTF. The mild Islamophobia and highly questionable casting choices in the film call to mind other texting…

Few filmmakers explore the mysteries of coupledom as touchingly as Philippe Garrel, who specializes in mapping out romantic triangles (whether acute, obtuse or oblique). The rich enigmas of his latest movie, about a husband and wife, both in their forties and each unfaithful to the other, start with its evocative…

The first Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s dopey, fitfully funny fashion spoof, was released less than three weeks after the September 11 attacks. Its sequel shows the extent to which another kind of nefarious plot — the cynical quest for world domination through cross-brand synergy — has proven impossible to eradicate on…

A kick for those who’ve distractedly thumbed through Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, Joel and Ethan Coen’s bustling comedy Hail, Caesar! looks back to the waning days of moviedom’s golden age: specifically, to 1951, when big-studio fixers were still tidying up the messes left by the talent (scrubbing now done by…

“Every film is a documentary of its actors,” Jean-Luc Godard once said. Starring Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling, Andrew Haigh’s shattering marital drama 45 Years expands that maxim: As we gaze at and listen to these performers, whose characters reflect on nearly a half-century together — almost as long as…

In most of his eight films and especially since The Fighter (2010), choreographer of chaos and screwball scion David O. Russell has assembled boisterous, buoyant casts. His manic ensemble players, like those in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, carom off one another, their high-pitched energy keeping the movies bustling…

Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay’s The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager’s rue-filled comedown after an energy-shot bender. Based on Michael Lewis’s 2010 bestselling book of the…

No sentence distills the essence of one strain of cinephilia — mine especially — better than this one: “Motion pictures are for people who like to watch women.” Bracing in its profound simplicity, this line was written in 1983 by Boyd McDonald (1925–1993), author of the essential collection Cruising the…

Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner has an unerring talent for examining, skeptically but never cynically, grand notions about destiny: What we perceive as — or have convinced ourselves to be — the workings of fate, whether religious or romantic, is ultimately better understood as arbitrary or coincidental occurrences. In Lourdes (2009),…

Michel Houellebecq is France’s most famous contemporary writer, owing in no small part to controversy that he either stirs up or can’t escape from. In 2002, he was tried for (and eventually acquitted of) “inciting racial hatred” for calling Islam “the dumbest religion” during an interview to promote his 2001…

For more than two decades, Alain Guiraudie has been unrivaled in depicting desires that upend convention, whether homo or hetero. In the comedy The King of Escape (2009), for instance, a middle-aged gay man falls in love with a 16-year-old girl; the film ends with an all-male gerontophilic ménage à…