The world needs fewer tasteful movies about distasteful things. It definitely doesn’t need J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year, in which Oscar Isaac plays a nouveau-riche heating-oil baron in early-1980s New York who’s striving to maintain his principles amid industry corruption and generally scummy behavior. Isaac’s Abel Morales skulks through…
There are few hard-and-fast rules in screenwriting, but here’s one we can probably agree on: Something has gone wrong if your crowd-pleasing family drama asks audiences to hope a child’s father proves to be a crackhead. That’s one baffling turn in Mike Binder’s Black or White, a movie about race…
Most of us can’t imagine having a disease that tugs and tears at the very threads of who we are. When we wake up in the middle of the night with outlandish fears, we strike reassuring bargains with ourselves: If I lose my sight, I’ll still have music. If I…
In the opening moments of Two Days, One Night, a working-class Belgian woman named Sandra (Marion Cotillard) wakes from a midday nap, takes a phone call, removes a tart from the oven, pops a pill, and begs herself not to cry. With a sense of having arrived in the middle…
While many of Oscar’s big shots clock in at more than two hours (led by favorite Boyhood, at 165 minutes), some filmmakers remain committed to telling unique and inventive stories that don’t require viewers to set aside an entire night to enjoy. The Academy Award — nominated short films —…
Halfway through Laura Gabbert’s documentary City of Gold, a salute to Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize–winning food critic’s brother Mark reveals a dark family secret: Gold grew up devouring iceberg lettuce and orange Jell-O. Every day, we eat. It’s a must. And those meals tell a story: The peanut sauce…
Let’s leap back to 1994. Grunge and gangsta rap dominated MTV — music that claimed to be gritty and honest. Yet that year in Orlando, as far away from Seattle as it gets, a Ponzi-scheme scam artist named Lou Pearlman selected five lads aged 14 to 21 to form the…
Each year, screenwriters kill off enough offscreen children to fill a Chuck E. Cheese. A dead son or daughter gives a movie the illusion of depth plus an easy explanation for whatever the script ladles on the surviving parents. Binge-drinking? Nymphomania? Sudden bouts of break dancing? Blame the wee coffin…
There’s something bracingly honest about The Humbling, Barry Levinson’s movie about a 67-year-old Shakespearean actor, played by Al Pacino, who, after being struck with crippling anxiety, gets his mojo restored — some of it, anyway — by a manipulative muse (Greta Gerwig). Based on the 2009 Philip Roth novel of…
The most pleasurably ludicrous highlight of The Boy Next Door comes a half-hour in, before the sex and murders and something-is-in-the-mirror-behind-her! jolts that stud the film like Flavor Crystals. The high-school English teacher played by Jennifer Lopez is dazzled by a gift from the handsome student (Ryan Guzman) who has…
If you’ve ever loved a terrible person, Mike Leigh’s quietly sensational Cannes competition entry Mr. Turner — a biopic, of sorts, covering the last 25 years of the life of the great 19th century British painter J.M.W. Turner – is the movie for you. In his seascapes and landscapes, Turner…
Mortdecai is creeping into theaters with the flushed shame of a debutante who expects to be pelted with tomatoes. It’s a pity. In 1965, Mortdecai would be the hit of the year. Director David Koepp whips through this pop-colored caper about crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) — one…
Richard Linklater ended his feel-good Best Picture contender on a high. His star, eighteen-year-old would-be artist Mason, graduated high school and was ready to conquer the world. But what if Linklater had kept filming? And what if Mason wasn’t an actor, but a real teenage boy? Meet Samuel Klemke. He,…
Anyone who loves Michael Mann movies, or even just the idea of Michael Mann movies, accepts that film style is a language and something more, a way of thinking, feeling, and looking that goes beyond basic plotting, dialogue, or character motivation. I can tell you pretty much everything that happens…
Emerson argued that each flourish and tendril of a work of art has its exact corollary in the mind of the artist, that creative expression is always, in its way, a sort of autobiography: Want to know the person? Look at her works. But Ralph Waldo never lived to see…
Forget its generic title, its breakup setup, and its indie-standard Brooklyn walk-and-talks: Writer/director Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior is the freshest comedy of life and love in the city since Obvious Child. Hilarious and heartbroken, Akhavan stars as Shirin, a bisexual Iranian-American video artist just bounced from her lover’s Gowanus apartment…
In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Navy SEAL Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) — an astoundingly talented marksman credited with more than 160 confirmed kills in Iraq — runs into a fellow veteran at a mechanic’s shop between deployments. The soldier shows Kyle an artificial leg and thanks him for saving his…
The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore’s great misfortune isn’t that it replaces The Colbert Report, but that it premieres after Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The Colbert Report was sui generis, and will likely remain so, because such a series makes leviathan demands on its host: crackerjack comedic skills,…
Paul Thomas Anderson was making serious movies long before he began making “serious” movies, ponderous works of certified art like There Will Be Blood and The Master. His earliest pictures, like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, and even the later Magnolia, were wily, imperfect, vibrating with life like yeast springing…
Twitter is double-stuffed with check-your-privilege messages for entitled men, but I’ve rarely seen one as potent as this singular line from Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s out-of-time masterwork Winter Sleep, a Chekhovian drama of marriage and class and the way both can inspire insulated cluelessness. “Just once, I’d like you to defend…
Describing Ava DuVernay’s quietly remarkable Selma to a friend, I caught myself referring to the Civil Rights Era as a historical event, a thing of the past, and then backtracked. The killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice at the hands of police officers — not to mention…
Without dropping spoilers right and left, how do I explain that I’m completely baffled by the Spierig Brothers’ retro-futuristic thriller Predestination? So the she that’s really a he is the earlier version of the he we meet later on, and the later version of the she who shows up near…
