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…
Partway through Ex Machina, Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a mousy coder at a giant tech company, and Nathan, his supergenius employer (Oscar Isaac), discuss whether or…
Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg opened with Greta Gerwig’s character, a young woman working as a wealthy man’s personal assistant, trying to merge into traffic, saying “Are you…
You can claim to be invested in the Fast and/or Furious series for fancy cars, or for the characters and the laid-back diversity of the cast,…
Hey look, another movie about a former black-bag operator whose past moral lapses catch up to him when some former colleagues attempt to have…
Jaume Collet-Serra’s last two films, Unknown and Non-Stop, were both now-patented Liam Neeson thrillers and Hitchcock-ian wrong man transmissions. In the former, Collet-Serra’s patient, often static camera…
Chappie opens with documentary-style footage of artificial intelligence experts discussing the apparently paradigm-shifting events of the film about to begin, before shifting to faux news…
Kinsman: The Secret Service is ostensibly both a rebuke to the increasingly self-serious spy genre and a tongue-in-cheek nod to the good old days of…
The Wachowskis have been formal innovators from the start, building a pulley system to show a body falling dead or breakaway sets to stage an…
Blackhat opens with a CG-animated representation of a block of data infiltrating a computer network. A tiny glowing grid sliding along a superconducting surface…
Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) is an ambitious immigrant who has secured a modest toe-hold distributing heating oil. Though he’s just taken a major risk…
During the 1960s, painter Margaret Keane’s artwork, largely depicting children with outlandishly large eyes, was sold under the name of her husband, Walter, who…
The recent controversy over the casting of predominantly white actors in Middle Eastern roles in Exodus: Gods and Kings is, it turns out, the…
Ostensibly a biopic about pioneering mathematician Alan Turing, The Imitation Game’s opening credits play out under a recording of King George VI’s 1939 radio…
After two Hunger Games films setting the stage for revolution in the future dystopia of PanEm, audiences are apparently finally ready for a third…
The self-consciously “epic” epic Interstellar is wildly ambitious, massive in scope, gorgeous to look at, often clumsily sentimental, very serious, and frequently overly expository.…
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), the latest film from Alejandro González Iñárritu, is a showy directorial performance about performance. By design, it’s…
War in cinema is often treated either as a crucible upon which manhood is tested and goodness defended (Saving Private Ryan) or as a…