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 lockstep…
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 most…
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 a…
News to absolutely nobody: in 2008 a mounting, toxic combination of sheer cluelessness and outright lawbreaking caused the US housing market to collapse, leading to…
A stain of blood remains on a shower window after a night of debauchery, a son miles away from home tells his mother, “I love…
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 that’s…
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) tells…
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 approach…
You actually get two movies in In the Heart of the Sea. One is a reasonably tight seafaring adventure yarn based on the true story…
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 Eilis…
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 the…
Combining what some have called his propensity for “arthouse miserablism” in films like Babel or Biutiful with a newfound fetish for conspicuous formal audacity (see…
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 some…
After surviving multiple rounds of teenage gladiatorial combat, inadvertently inciting an armed uprising, and becoming a media darling and symbol for revolt against a tyrannical…
The re-emergence of the culinary arts as part of the zeitgeist has been an evolving narrative for the past decade, most noticeably found on the…
Over the years the James Bond movies have fought to stay relevant in one way or another. Look at some of Roger Moore’s more amusingly…
Ma (Brie Larson) and her five-year-old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) live in Room, the backyard shed of a man who has kept Ma (real name…
Those who’ve seen James Marsh’s superior 2008 documentary Man on Wirewill be familiar with most of the narrative territory explored in Robert Zemeckis’s faithful recreation…
Guillermo del Toro’s sympathies have always been with his orphan, discarded monsters: the aging vampire in Cronos, the beautiful, malevolent creatures of Pan’s Labyrinth, or the dying…
It’s hard to tell if Steve Jobs is better or worse for its general avoidance of “how we live now” handwringing. Even The Social Network, to which this…