Film, TV & Streaming

The film plays as if a three-hour epic has been sliced down to size in the editing, but only the scenes establishing character and context have been cut

It sets a host of alternative Spider-folk running amok in the New York City of Brooklyn teen Miles Morales, the mixed-race Spider-Man (his father is black and his mother Latinx) invented for the comics in 2011 by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli

The actresses share only one scene in the film, but Mary Queen of Scots sets them up in counterpoint, two divergent approaches to the question of how women who wield power can actually govern the men around them

The writer-director shot Roma in chronological order, without showing the cast the script, unveiling it to the actors the same way it is for the audience, piece by piece, a chance to marinate in each moment as it plays out

This time, though, the lessons are urgent, the jungle threatened by man, the wicked tiger Shere Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch) a true terror vowing to one day taste that boy’s blood

Today, I’m still awed by the film’s scope and scale, by its relentless energy and attention to detail, by its interest in faces and names and coats and belongings

Based on a collection of true news items about exactly what the film’s title promises, Kore-eda’s story centers around a household that at first might appear to be a somewhat ordinary family that has merely fallen on hard times

It’s the early 18th century, there’s a war on with France, and the persistently ill, somewhat childish Anne struggles both to assert her authority and to preserve her kingdom and her crown

This time, we meet the sharecropping peasants of the remote village of Inviolata, living lives of seasonal toil, lives that look — except for the occasional radio or lightbulb — like they might have a century or so ago

The couple has begun to discover that raw truth that, around 1960, American novelists and filmmakers were only starting to face in their art: that the post-war dream of a little house and a little family just might not be enough to ensure happiness

Lee Chang-dong’s dexterity with the telling minutiae of human interactions ensures that Burning makes for an emotionally gripping film

The actual 2018 Robin Hood remains a haphazard action thriller taking place sometime during the Crusades, with Taron Egerton basically reprising his breakout Kingsman role as a scrappy normie getting recruited and trained for skilled combat

The story concerns sort of a play date between the kids fathered by the first generation of Rocky boxers: Creed versus the son of Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago, who in Rocky IV was built up as pretty much the most devastating weapon in the Soviet nuclear arsenal

Volf supports his interpretation of Callas’ personality with sound bites from her understandably guarded televised appearances, all of which devolve into terse discussions about her years-long romance with Onassis (before and after his marriage to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis)

Probing the painter’s senses as he tramps about the south of France, Schnabel’s film is drunk with light, a little touched in the head itself, giving over to van Gogh’s perspective through gorgeously disorienting POV shots …

El Angel is a crime spree as improvised reverie, one with a subject who is as quick to give away his loot as the director is to make the subtext explicit

Akhavan created and cowrote The Bisexual (with her Miseducation cowriter Cecilia Frugiuele) and stars (she also directed four out of its six episodes) in this comedy about an American immigrant in London

The film’s most arresting, revealing passages — the only scenes where anyone disagrees with anyone else about anything at all — concern the town council

… It’s a mother’s story, with Yates following not just Flynn but also Meg McGarry, a filmmaker herself, who has been documenting for years her son’s culinary blossoming — and her encouragement

In typical Coen fashion, most people in the movie meet ironic or wry deaths, but this time the Coens seem to be actively eschewing any deeper emotional connection between the audience and the characters

The story of two girls who are too smart for their circumstances, one of whom will manage to transcend them, the show casts the minutiae of their tiny world as high drama

Pike’s Colvin is haunted by visions of carnage she has seen, sometimes imagining that her London home is a bombed-out shell of itself, that a little girl she once saw die is lying in her own bed