Arts & Culture

Its leads, feminist writer Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) and Richard (Paul Giamatti), a one-time wunderkind of no-budget theatrical productions, find themselves desperate to conceive a child even as the doctors they pay (with borrowed money) thousands to speak frankly of the odds

Who’d have thought a show about the origins of a shyster/lawyer with a fake name whose clients are murderous drug dealers would turn out to be TV’s most satisfying depiction of an honest day’s work?

For a movie centered around the needless death of a child, Jalilvand (Wednesday, May 9) creates a heartbreaking but still hopeful story

Ultimately a story about brotherhood, friendship and the insecurity of life in a violent place, the film injects a sweetness and innocence into the genre, mostly through one stellar performance by John C. Reilly

The Hate U Give takes time to focus on the nuances of Starr’s life, on the ways Williamson has split her consciousness, on the effort of code-switching, on the layers of self that Starr must sort through in everyday interactions

To fall in love with A Star Is Born is to embrace these paradoxes and, to quote a song Gaga sings in the film, go “off the deep end” and submerge oneself “far from the shallow.”

The idea practically sells itself: Kevin Hart has to take night classes to get his high school degree, and Tiffany Haddish plays his suffer-no-bullshit teacher

Too bad, then, that even Laguna’s input doesn’t get to the heart of Jett’s essence, as Bad Reputation comes off more as a fanboy’s declaration of reverence to the queen rather than an interrogation of one of the most iconic women in music

… After a somewhat compelling hour suggesting all the reasons that Borden might be willing to kill, Macneill and screenwriter Bryce Kass tantalize with the possibility of their subject’s innocence

Roth’s film is a funhouse throwback, a scare-the-kids goof with a top-shelf cast, an antique shop’s worth of creepy windup dolls and more heart than you might expect — and, like those jack-o’-lanterns, it’s got more teeth, too

Radner narrates, in a way, through her own audio diaries, plus some snippets of interviews and judicious excerpts from the audiobook of her perfectly titled — and just-barely posthumous — memoir, It’s Always Something

It is to Hawke’s credit that he has invested what clout he has gathered in his industry into this study of an artist who never gathered much clout at all — and that the resulting film has the warm, weary rhythms of Foley’s own songs

There’s a sense that Fogelman … has been inspired in part by the broken narratives of Charlie Kaufman, as the first 10 minutes of this film feature a story-within-a-story meta fake-out with Jackson as himself, narrating the action of a screenplay written by forlorn drunk Will (Isaac)

Despite the killing-spree craziness of its final reels, much of the film is a how-the-kids-live-now potboiler, replete with guileless dirty talk and immense bedroom windows that seem to have been installed with peeping in mind

The pups, named Primrose and Poppet and Phil and Potomac and Patriot, get dispatched from the organization Guide Dogs for the Blind to the homes of families dedicated to raising them for the first half of their training

But 11/9 plays not like a much-needed blast of truth but like an all-purpose Michael Moore sequel, a self-congratulatory follow-up to several of his films, with Parkland material in the Bowling for Columbine vein, references to Sicko and even excerpts from 1989’s Roger & Me

Its centerpiece is a breathless break-in at the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, as two 30ish suburbanites, played by Gael Garcia Bernal and Leonardo Ortizgris, attempt to loot artifacts from what is known as the Mayan room

Cosmatos delivers (as fans say) on the blood and guts, on cathartic slaughter, on the disreputable pleasure of watching a bereaved hero regard a new weapon and envision nasty uses for it

This latest entry, directed and co-written by onetime wise-ass action screenplay wunderkind Shane Black (Iron Man 3, The Nice Guys), wears its self-aware humor as a talisman against the predictability of its plot and the gratuitousness of its carnage