In Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking, the filmmaker staged a Somali pirate hostage negotiation in real time. The film was all business, keeping any opinions about morality…
Sticking to a reliable and remarkably elastic formula, the Coen brothers’ 1950s Hollywood farce Hail, Caesar! is, like Burn After Reading or Raising Arizona, another deceptively fluffy screwball…
Despite admonitions in the press materials and interviews with the principals, Michael Bay’s (maybe appropriately) dreaded Benghazi movie can’t possibly read as completely apolitical.…
A typical year spent traversing the cinematic landscape results in straddling some kind of line: one foot confidently marches off into the future while the other remains firmly planted in…
Evaluating performances is such a deeply subjective endeavor that finding a meaningful consensus can often feel like an impossibility. Truly extraordinary ones tend to work in…
The Hateful Eight often plays like a mean prank, and maybe that shouldn’t come as a surprise from Quentin Tarantino, who’s simultaneously one of the…
Ryan Coogler’s Rocky spin-off Creed begins, evocatively, in a juvenile corrections facility. A handsomely framed shot depicts a line of African-American boys filing through…
News to absolutely nobody: in 2008 a mounting, toxic combination of sheer cluelessness and outright lawbreaking caused the US housing market to collapse, leading…
A stain of blood remains on a shower window after a night of debauchery, a son miles away from home tells his mother, “I…
Like someone’s old love letters or the keepsake wilted flowers of a first love, Carol has the feel of a kind of attic picture…
At one point in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a much-older Han Solo (Harrison Ford, more engaged here than in a very long while)…
Where to Invade Next is really a whole bunch of different movies, but just about each one of them is incisive and humane. Michael Moore’s…
You actually get two movies in In the Heart of the Sea. One is a reasonably tight seafaring adventure yarn based on the true…
The biggest surprise of Brooklyn is how determinedly sweet it remains to the end, its period vibrancy bordering on the genteel. In navigating the push-pull narrative of…
Joy begins with an on-screen dedication to “daring women” and a scene from a hypothetical cheesy soap opera in which two women argue about…
Combining what some have called his propensity for “arthouse miserablism” in films like Babel or Biutiful with a newfound fetish for conspicuous formal audacity…
Period homages or allusions to Hollywood’s past can be diminished without a new perspective to contextualize them. This is to say, reviving a given style can be limiting without…
After surviving multiple rounds of teenage gladiatorial combat, inadvertently inciting an armed uprising, and becoming a media darling and symbol for revolt against a…