Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, the fifth installment in this franchise, finds hero superspy Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, but you knew that) battling a sinister organization…
Like a lot of the best, or at least most well-regarded films for children, Pixar’s Inside Out is more for grown-ups than for kids. It’s got…
Though Days of Being Wild is Wong Kar-Wai’s second feature, in many ways it’s a film of firsts. It’s his first collaboration with Christopher Doyle (arguably the…
There is a remarkable shot late in The Age of Innocence when the narrator (Joanne Woodward) describes a room in Newland Archer’s (Daniel Day-Lewis) New York…
After menacing the world with inter-dimensional aliens, robots bent on mankind’s extermination, and cities plummeting from the sky, maybe it’s time Marvel did something…
The Coen Brothers have a habit of using an innocuous object as a catalyst for many of their convoluted plots. This is slightly different…
Slick, loud, violent, merchandized to death, politically retrograde, largely scrubbed of idiosyncrasy, and also pretty exciting, Jurassic World is, like the original 1993 Jurassic Park, simultaneously we-tampered-in-God’s-domain…
Terminator Genisys (don’t ask about the spelling) is, by most counts, the third attempt to kickstart a new trilogy of movies in this franchise. Let’s…
2012’s Magic Mike got a lot of folks into the theater on the promise of a fun romp about male strippers, then, along with all that…
Though it’s not typically thought of as part of the Judd Apatow canon, The Cable Guy (which was co-written by an uncredited Apatow, who also produced,…
Rarely has a film’s meaning been so contingent on purposefully disconcerting stylistic contrivances. In Fallen Angels, Wong Kar-wai and his longtime cinematographer Christopher Doyle use their collaborative…
It seems that Aloha, Cameron Crowe’s newest drama, is just him taking a mulligan on 2005’s widely (and somewhat unfairly) derided Elizabethtown. Both films feature a disgraced wunderkind…
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is little more than an excuse for elaborate CG destruction and cliched narrative bullet points. Dwayne “The…
At one point in Tomorrowland, an exasperated George Clooney complains to a young woman (Britt Robertson) who keeps asking him to explain all the awesome…
Proof of the lasting influence of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 docudrama The Battle of Algiers can be glimpsed in two relatively recent films making a sizable dent in…
By the time of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the third entry in George Miller’s original scorched-Earth trilogy, society had begun to rebuild itself, but the post-apocalypse…
A three-ring circus exhibiting acts of murder, mutilation, sexual frenzy, and religious fanaticism, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre has a little something to perturb everyone. The story centers…
There are a lot of superhero movies these days, evidently the subject of much critical handwringing. Maybe they’re poisoning popular cinema — bloated advertisements for themselves…