Arts & Culture

For the young cowboys at the heart of Zhao’s film, mounting a horse and galloping across a field represents more than just freedom — it becomes a communion with the past and the future, allowing these riders to imagine and inhabit their best selves

At their core, both Overboards are traditional rich-person-learns-how-to-be-a-real-person farces, the kind of films Frank Capra and Preston Sturges used to direct in their sleep

… Bad Samaritan — with its title sounding very Grisham — tells the story of a low-level thief who breaks into a fancy-schmancy house and discovers a woman being held captive in a plastic-lined, camera-surveilled room

{Lucrecia Martel) transforms Benedetto’s epic into a dizzying, sensory head trip about a man’s gradual psychological decay, allowing larger historical and political themes to emerge organically from her meticulous formal compositions

… Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman have completed their trilogy of self-delusion with Tully, a gently sardonic look at a 40-year-old woman who finds herself in a cluttered house, with a clueless spouse, preparing to have a third child

This epic, the first of two final Avengers films, finds the Class of ‘12 — the core Avengers — getting together for one last rager, joined by select newbies and spazzes from the ranks of sophomores and freshmen

… You Were Never Really Here follows the disjointed, tormented inner journey of Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a former soldier and law enforcement official who now works as a kind of hammer-wielding vigilante-for-hire, finding missing people (usually, it seems, kids)

Working from a novel by Willy Vlautin, Haigh has committed himself to making a boy-and-his-horse movie that’s scraped free of everything false or sentimental about the genre

Brad Anderson’s talky-smartish thriller Beirut, like the first half of Million Dollar Arm, sets Hamm’s sharpie loose in a country — in this case a fractious Lebanon — where the rules aren’t his

Grisebach surveys her incidents (river work, bar nights, outdoor parties, horseback reveries, confrontations between townies and outsiders) from various vantage points, honoring the perspectives of all parties

Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes

The film sends the simultaneous messages that it’s futile to coddle children but also that it’s OK to feel the icky stuff that you feel, because even your weaknesses can be transformed to strengths

Already the show’s producers have revealed, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Roseanne and Dan Conner (Barr and John Goodman) voted for Trump, which has created a rift between Roseanne and her sister

Soozandeh wastes no time establishing both the hypocrisy of the devout in Iran (or America, or Gilead) and his Short Cuts-ian tapestry of characters

… This first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzi (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia …

An episodic ensemble drama organized around the logic of theme rather than of traditional narrative, the film concerns above all else accumulation and dispersal, in the American vein