Arts & Culture

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…

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…

Look, you don’t need to have watched Iron Fist to enjoy the brisk, brawling silliness of The Defenders, a team-up adventure that’s something like a surprising return on an investment you thought had soured. In fact, not knowing all the plot details of all the earlier stories brings the experience…

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,…

On a crowded Brooklyn street, an Orthodox Jew adjusts his yarmulke, a tefillin bag under his arm. He speaks on a smartphone and practically struts. The man, as dandified as one can look in a black suit and a white shirt, is a red herring in Menashe. Several other Brooklynites,…

Here’s what Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Bodyguard has going for it: It’s exactly the movie it promises to be, but more so. It’s more wild, more hilarious, more giddily irresponsible — it’s the hard R action comedy that kids sneaking into it might imagine it’s going to be, minus ’70s…

In Steven Soderbergh’s hillbilly heist comedy Logan Lucky, the West Virginia prison where vault specialist Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) resides is pristine and peaceful. This is a high-security facility in a seemingly alternate world, a jail without racial tensions where the prisoners feast on edible food. While only a small…

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…

What will become of Zion? No, not the loosely defined term for a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, but a mild-mannered and fundamentally righteous shopkeeper living in Jerusalem and pulled between conservative religious forces and modernity. (Oh, so maybe I do mean the Jewish homeland in the Middle East.)…

The dictates of Hollywood screenwriting can’t quite constrain the wildness of Jeannette Walls’ family and her best-selling memoir. Despite a tidy resolution, too many scenes whose shapes are immediately familiar from other movies, and an absurd climax that dramatizes the conflict between a daughter and her father through the wheezy…

In the 1980s, four-quadrant studio comedies (i.e. for the whole family) peddled in relentlessly dark premises that directors then brightened up with wholesomeness: Three Men and a Baby features an orphaned infant who is mistakenly given away to drug dealers; Ghostbusters boasts multiple fatalities at the hands of an accountant…

Yes, you’ve heard it’s bad. It is. But there are some things to like in The Dark Tower, directed by Nikolaj Arcel, the new adaptation of Stephen King’s epic novel series. Just as in the books, an evil sorcerer named The Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey) orders around his henchpeople…

It’s August, which means it’s even hotter than July and you need TV now more than ever! The planet is hot, but you watching TV in your underwear with a fan pointed directly at your swimsuit parts is even hotter! Have at it! Manhunt: Unabomber, Aug. 1 (Discovery) Essentially, this…

It’s hard to imagine a less promising film title than An Inconvenient Sequel. Maybe Another Imposition Upon Your Time? It’s clear, in the opening minutes, as we watch him shake off the slights and smears of his critics, that Al Gore is too savvily upbeat a technocrat to give the…

Officially, the brutish thriller Atomic Blonde takes place in Berlin just before and after the toppling of the Wall, in early November 1989. But this seismic event is really just a backdrop for another epochal marker: the decade that saw the birth of MTV and the height of New German…

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.)…

Here’s how a fan magazine might profile the hero of The Last Tycoon (Amazon), played by Matt Bomer. His name belongs in marquees, but he deserves a place somewhere higher. Monroe Stahr toils as an angel on Earth, making dreams come true every day as a producer at Brady-American Pictures…

Sometimes critics and filmmakers agree. We suggested, in our 2015 review of People Places Things, that writer-director James Strouse should please give more screen time to supporting actor Jessica Williams. Now, in his new rom-com for Netflix, The Incredible Jessica James, he turns the camera directly at the former Daily…

“Every love story is a ghost story,” David Foster Wallace wrote, more than once. That evocative observation is probed in David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, a film that occasionally reaches a similar level of eloquence. Lowery’s fourth feature reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, the leads of his second, the…