Michael Shannon isn’t a stickler for rules. In his career, he’s ignored most of them, especially the mandate that a theater-trained, Oscar-nominated actor should shun the large roles in dumb movies that let him afford the smart ones. (See: Kangaroo Jack, Bad Boys II, Premium Rush, Man of Steel.) Shannon’s…
There’s much to sadly shake your head at in Pan, a sort of Peter Pan Begins that manages the unlikely feat of making battles between flying pirate ships a crushing bore. Most miserably, there’s the great heap of action set pieces that are easier to wait out than to track…
You’d have to be a monster not to be sniffling by the end of Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, a weepy/rousing retelling of real-life gay-rights triumph that serves as a helpful reminder that the dark ages were, like, just ten years ago. It’s love that lights up that darkness, of course, and…
Desperation, anxiety, stubbornly saying yes to survival: If grand struggles are your thing, there are plenty in Ridley Scott’s The Martian, based on Andy Weir’s popular novel, which was first self-published in 2011 and then picked up by Crown in 2014 — itself a rare seedling that took root against…
The good news about the Richard Gere drama about the bad news of New York’s enduring homeless crisis? Time Out of Mind, written and directed by Oren Moverman, is stubbornly, respectfully unflashy, Manhattan neorealism steeped more in reportage than in the clichés of prestige films. A prideful man slow to…
Those of us who have been waiting forever for Joseph Gordon-Levitt to make a musical now have the next best thing: In Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk, this breezy Puck of an actor plays high-wire artist Philippe Petit, who walked the space between the World Trade Center’s twin towers in 1974…
In the mid-20th Century, movie audiences understood the value of a good melodrama: A picture like Now, Voyager or Black Narcissus or almost anything by Douglas Sirk could be an urn into which you could pour your own unarticulated feelings of loss and loneliness. The heightened, unrealistic intensity of those…
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a great movie, be it the horror that thrills you, the drama that moves you, or the romantic comedy that pretty much shapes the way you dream of falling in love. And it’s even more satisfying to occasionally get away from the big ol’…
Sometimes a face is enough to anchor a movie. In writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, Elisabeth Moss plays Catherine, a young city-dweller who, after recently suffering both her father’s death by suicide and a crushing breakup, treks to the country to spend a week with her best friend,…
Some veteran filmmakers try to capture the younger generation and fail to get it right, coming up with characters and faux with-it dialogue that invite lots of “Oh, Mom!” eye-rolling. That’s not the problem with writer/director Nancy Meyers’ The Intern, in which retiree Robert De Niro finds meaning in life…
With found footage having long ago supplanted torture porn as the horror subgenre du jour, the prospect of a new Eli Roth movie might seem even more dubious than it was during the director’s heyday. The Green Inferno arrives in theaters two years after making the festival rounds and a…
The hardest type of guy for an actor to play is one without charisma. That’s the challenge faced by Tobey Maguire in Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice, which tells the story of Cold War-era chess champ and totally strange human being Bobby Fischer. He’s good at it — maybe too good…
James “Whitey” Bulger was more like a character from a 17th-century folktale than a late-20th-century criminal, the sort of figure who’d murder innocents on wooded roadways and then, with a shrug, toss their bloody bones to hungry wild dogs. In ’80s and early-’90s Boston, he headed a criminal syndicate known…
Friendships between women have the ambiguous vitality of growing vines: They can either strangle or nurture, and at times it can be hard to tell the difference. That’s particularly true for young women first stepping into the puzzling gray area of rivalries and loyalties. How best to support your friends…
Young people are the only ones who ever talk about growing old gracefully. For those actually in the thick of it, the romance of that notion burns off pretty quickly, and wrinkles and creaky joints are the least of it: Growing old, gracefully or otherwise, means becoming the person you…
Even if you’re the sort who believes there can be no such thing as too much political coverage, it can’t hurt to cast a fond glance back to 1968, when only three networks — NBC, CBS, and the perennial laggard ABC — jockeyed for the attention of the American public…
A sense of humor will take you far in life, even along a daunting stretch of the Appalachian Trail. In his hugely popular 1998 book A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt to hike the full length of the trail, from Georgia to Maine, accompanied by an…
The first famous tennis player was King Louis X of France. Nicknamed Louis the Quarreler for his domestic politics, meaning he was likely a real pain to the ref, King Louis is renowned for two facts in athletic lore: He invented the indoor tennis court, and, after a hard, hot…
Director Alex Gibney’s choice to follow this spring’s Scientology slam Going Clear with the fascinating portrait Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine might seem like an about-face. The first documentary clinically eviscerated a religion that everyone loves to loathe. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, however, is adulated to an incredible…
There’s a lot to laugh at in Daniel Lee’s faux-historical Silk Road adventure Dragon Blade, not least of which is the sight of Adrien Brody as corrupt Roman consul Tiberius wearing a tumble of raven-colored beauty-queen curls and purring in a phony British thespian’s accent. With his blue crushed-velvet cape…
There’s a knot of tough, tender, persuasive scenes near the end of Isabel Coixet’s life-advice drama Learning to Drive. These are muscular enough that, had they come earlier, they might have powered the movie — the filmmakers’ hearts might be in the right place, but the film’s doesn’t kick in…
Brooke, Greta Gerwig’s latest Manhattan creation, is a hurricane gobbling up lives. She’s a singer, restaurateur, interior decorator, math coach, spinning instructor, and self-described autodidact. When 18-year-old admirer Tracy (Lola Kirke), Brooke’s sister-to-be following their parents’ Thanksgiving wedding, squeaks that she wants to write short stories, Brooke devours that idea…
