Maggie Betts’ Novitiate bears all the signs of an exceptional talent. It follows the experiences of Cathleen (Margaret Qualley), a teenager who enters a convent in the early 1960s just as the Catholic Church was starting to undergo the reforms of Vatican II. The title refers to the girls’ yearlong…
“I wish I could live through something,” the title character laments to her mother in the opening scene of writer/director Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. Played with comical intensity by Saoirse Ronan, 17-year-old Lady Bird — nee Christine — is too young to realize that she is inescapably living through something,…
My Friend Dahmer, from a graphic memoir of the same name by the pseudonymous Derf Backderf, is a kind of coming-of-age tale that dissects a troubled kid’s descent into murder. Backderf was a high-school pal of the boy who would grow up to become the serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey…
Despite the bright cinematography, there’s something quaint and comforting about this film and its brand of old-fashioned storytelling …
Gilbert Gottfried’s nasally obnoxiousness has wormed its way in (and out) of America’s hearts for decades — through his stand-up comedy, his voice-acting work as Aladdin’s Iago and Aflec’s duck, and his epically crude rendition of The Aristocrats joke, his too-soon Japanese tsunami jokes (which got him fired from that…
When I first saw Brett Morgen’s 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, I was shocked that the film somehow matched the rollicking, mercurial energy of its subject, producer Robert Evans. Morgen reimagined the use of archival footage and voiceover, and the style he pioneered has now been mimicked…
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
When same-sex marriage became legal in Finland this past March, the government celebrated by releasing an official emjoi — a leather-clad man with a drooping mustache and a police-style cap emblazoned with the word “Tom.” No explanation was necessary, for “Tom” was clearly a nod to Tom of Finland —…
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…
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…
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…
New Yorkers will immediately recognize the opening shots of One of Us, the new documentary from Jesus Camp filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady: ultra-Orthodox Jewish families roaming the big city, the women and girls in skirts and tights, the men and boys in long black coats and hats, looking…
“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…
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…
Filmmaking is not a poor man’s game. Even as digital cameras get cheaper, making a film worthy of release still requires dough to get off the ground, which means the folks who tell stories through cinema tend to come from backgrounds of privilege. That breeds movies aimed at middle- 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,…
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…
Writer/director Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is achingly normal, in a good way. Robinson has proven herself capable of melding her sincere and often endearingly campy sensibilities to any cinematic style — spy spoofs (D.E.B.S.), Disney family flicks (Herbie: Fully Loaded), comic-dramas (The L Word), sexy vampire…
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…
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…
