Film, TV & Streaming

The characters talk extensively about what matters to them rather than what matters to the plot, exposing themselves, sharing the worries that keep them up at night

Also just like History, Period offers a chance for comedians and the actors who love them to play dress-up and goof off in a period-piece setting

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

In Between is a movie not so much about suffering as it is about the grinding reality of just being

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

In the tense but hearty Chilean drama A Fantastic Woman, actress Daniela Vega plays a transwoman, Marina, who must navigate life after the death of her lover

It’s a twisty-turny crime drama complete with stolen money, vengeful mob bosses and all sorts of strange coincidences and random dialogue digressions

The narrative is needlessly complicated, and it all seems crafted just to build to a single joke voiced in the third act

Here’s the Marvel movie even non-Marvel fans are prepared to root for, the rare black superhero film, one boasting not only an almost-all black cast but helmed by a black director as well

The only fantasies Fifty Shades Freed convincingly fulfills are those of boutique publishers who would like to believe that a debut novel can acquire 250,000 preorders and that a local glossy can employ upwards of 50 full-time staffers, both of which occur in this film

… While the film does insist on its own irreverence a bit too much at the outset — it opens with a group of birds inspirationally singing, “You’re only as small as your dreams,” before they get abruptly knocked out of the sky — it offers plenty of lively fun once it settles down …

The Ritual finds a quartet of British lads/drips hiking through the deserted woods of northern Sweden, a labyrinth of ancient trees with trunks that stretch up forever

I’m Time’s Up-invigorated and ready to BURN IT ALL DOWN, so please take all my recommendations with a grain of salt, because if it stars a white man, I’d like to see it in the garbage can

Citizen Rose is strongest at the start, when it juxtaposes McGowan’s present-day anguish with the media coverage of her as a young starlet in the late 1990s and early 2000s

There’s time to wonder, as Momoa huffs across the peaks of Newfoundland, what it says about us as a species that so many of us relish the dramatization of acts of terrible cruelty but first demand narrative justification

Something of a prank, a farewell, an art project, a buddy comedy, a vox populi tour of the French countryside, and an inquiry into memory and images and what it means to reveal our eyes to the world, Faces Places is a joyous lulu. It finds the great documentarian and…

At a slim 77 minutes, Porto should seem as fleeting as the memories it’s trying to capture, but it dragged through so many dull scenes that I continually caught myself checking the time

Great News has a screwball charm and a flair for rapid-fire jokes, built on a premise that amusingly literalizes the classic sitcom concept of coworkers as family

That’s the real thrill: Those mind-blown moments when your perception of what is possible on this Earth expands like a blowfish puffing up its stomach with water

When these performers get the chance to exchange dialogue, to react to each other rather than declaim the movie’s themes, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool rouses to life

It’s a somewhat boisterous adventure, a war movie where you cheer not just for the boys to make it home but for them to complete the mission

Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves comes in a cut above the usual trash that Gerard Butler stars in (Law Abiding Citizen, Olympus Has Fallen), which is to say it’s a cut above movies that themselves are already passably diverting …