The Rider

In a certain renowned short story, Annie Proulx wrote “The huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him.”  It was an instant, all-timer passage, and one also describing the best American film released to-date this year. The Rider—an examination of the myth…

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I Feel Pretty

What if we could all be at peak confidence 24/7? Would we finally manifest the lives we so often make excuses not to attain? If we see ourselves differently, will everyone else? We can now forgive Amy Schumer for the lowbrow hijinks of 2016’s…

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Lean on Pete

Lean on Pete works on the strength of a terrific performance from young star Charlie Plummer as a down-on-his luck teen who befriends a past-his-prime racehorse. The pair teams up for a leisurely trek across the West in a modest movie that has a…

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A Quiet Place

The central visual motif in A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s heartland horror story of a distant future where marauding creatures lurk, is the “shhh” of an index finger covering the lips. The actors barely make a sound, and neither does the audience for a…

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Ready Player One

Steven Spielberg’s visionary Ready Player One straddles old and new—post-modern and nostalgic—in a conceptual feat of imagination equal parts endearing and fatiguing. Guess which one wins? Despite its loving homage to 80s pop culture, the master has crafted a check-box movie with only a…

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A Fantastic Woman

The merits of Sebastian Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman are primarily a deeply human performance from revelatory star Daniela Vega and a well-observed portrait of quiet dignity in the face of an unforgiving world. It is a movie, in its own way, as much about…

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In the Fade

A powerhouse Diane Kruger drives Fatih Akin’s German thriller In the Fade, a gripping descent into grief and revenge courtesy of the star’s 2017 Cannes-winning performance. Kruger, in every scene of the film, acts with a startling rawness, clawing deeply into the emotions of…

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Phantom Thread

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ravishing Phantom Thread, featuring Daniel Day Lewis as a celebrated 1950s London fashion designer whose world is turned upside down upon the arrival of a new muse, is an exceedingly well-made excursion into the mind of an obsessive undone by, perhaps,…

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