Here’s a recurring nightmare I’ve had since seeing Nicolas Pesce’s The Eyes of My Mother: I’m parking my car — I don’t even have a car — on a desolate street in broad daylight. As I put change in the meter, a man walks close beside me, then closer and…
Nice girls play by the rules. They turn their shoulders inward and nibble on the ends of their slim fingers, nervous about all those difficult thoughts in their heads. And their hair is always perfect and feathery like a baby bird on a collector’s plate. If this description sounds angry,…
Eventually, there will be so many films about a sullen or damaged man returning to his provincial town to face the demons of his past that Netflix will make a separate category for them. At their worst, these movies are navel-gazing vanity projects for their writers and directors (Cameron Crowe,…
Pervert, auteur, provocateur: Filmmaker John Waters has been called many things in his nearly fifty-year career, but “Christmas fan” might be the oddest. And the most accurate. The man who introduced his best friend, the late drag queen Divine, to the world by making her eat dog poop on camera…
Every December brings two types of cinematic adventures: a deluge of holiday-themed films (find them all on our holiday film list) and a flood of films with “award season buzz” that the studios save for the end of the year so that they’re fresher in the minds of voters for…
Tired of avoiding talking about politics with your family? You’re in luck: There are plenty of good movies out this weekend, from a solid feel-good flick from Disney, a sci-fi thriller about the way we communicate and a spy movie that feels fresh.
Alia Shawkat’s great comic skill is for the continually fresh expression of a determined disgust. That eager face of hers, beneath its constellations of freckles and her great Harpo-frizzed curls, is forever souring up with disappointment, even as her characters strive not to let this on. To feel let down…
Oh man, are we in a backlash on liberal, PC culture right now. I mean, if you can call electing the KKK’s and Nazi party’s greatest white hope to the highest office in the world a backlash. I can’t even count how many people — strangers, family, trolls — have…
There’s a grand concept to Seasons, the mostly terrestrial animal-observation doc from the creators of Winged Migration and Oceans, but in practice the film, a beauty, is about animals surprising you. You’ll be pleasantly engaged in observing a bird standing there after a snowfall, and then a snowbank will shudder…
When last we saw Howard Hughes onscreen, Leonardo DiCaprio was repeating “the way of the future” ad infinitum as he gazed into the mirror. Warren Beatty’s long-in-the-making Rules Don’t Apply isn’t nearly as concerned with the future as Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator was, looking instead to the past and all…
Maybe it was the agitated, election-induced state of mind I was in when I saw it, but Disney’s Moana feels like a movie about how easy it can be to give up, and how important it is not to. It’s funny, joyful, and sweet, and yet down below, running beneath…
As Allied opens, Brad Pitt parachutes so gently and quietly onto a stretch of Moroccan desert that at first you think he might be dead. And maybe he sort of is — maybe he has to be. Pitt’s Max Vatan is a pinched, terse figure in the first act of…
When you call cows, you say co’boss. And when you call sheep, you say co’da. This information is relayed to us in the first few minutes of Peter and the Farm by Peter Dunning, who’s lived and worked on 187 acres near Brattleboro, Vermont for the lion’s share of his…
A French Village starts off on June 12, 1940, with a premiere that includes a German fighter plane shooting at children on a school trip. The scene is suspenseful but also staged with deliberate restraint, like a dream slowly turning into a nightmare before anybody quite realizes it. The series…
Let’s face it: While you might share some chuckles with your family and friends across the dinner table, Thanksgiving isn’t a laugh-out-loud sort of holiday. It’s mostly parades and football and televised dog shows (that is, if NBC succeeds in making that the tradition it desperately wants it to be)…
It’s impossible not to think of the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park while watching Bryan Bertino’s chilling and succinctly titled The Monster. You remember: It’s dark, and the rains have started. The Jeeps have stalled en route to their destination. The kids are in one car, adults in the other,…
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, written as an original screenplay by author J.K. Rowling, is an expansion of her Harry Potter universe, and a test: Without lovable, adolescent leads Harry, Hermione Grainger, and Ron Weasley, or the elaborate narrative backbone provided by Rowling’s novels, can the wizarding world…
Tom Ford has entirely overstuffed his nesting-doll domestic drama-cum-thriller Nocturnal Animals, and yet I spent much of the film worrying that it might not have a point. Its aesthetic footprint is huge, but its impact decidedly small scale. That’s not always a bad thing; there’s a perverse elegance to so…
In one of the more bizarre coincidences of film scheduling, the brief life of a TV journalist whose biggest scoop was announcing her own death on air is recapitulated for the second time this year. Released in August, Robert Greene’s porous documentary Kate Plays Christine highlights the impossibility, even the…
Aisholpan Nurgaiv has never met this eagle she’s posing with — borrowed from a local animal wrangler — on a balcony at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. In 90-degree heat, she’s a 15-year-old girl sweating in her Mongolian winter clothes, including a hat made from the first fox she…
Sure, teen comedies make stars of their leading ladies and fellas, but what about the authority figures? Eugene Levy’s nameless dad in American Pie is peripheral but memorable as a bumbly guiding force. Tina Fey’s Ms. Norbury in Mean Girls is a motherly but revelatory mess of a teacher. Harry…
Ben Younger’s workmanlike but nevertheless rousing Bleed for This accomplishes something that’s a tall order for any boxing movie: It makes the inspirational training-montage sequences weird. Those are generally the most requisite and unexciting element of the genre, but Bleed for This freshens them thanks to the strange and disturbing…
