The crown movie jewel of 2017, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name is a masterpiece of first love and heartbreak and an immediate classic, one of the best pictures ever made about the coming of age of a teenaged boy and of such…
Read MoreA rousing entry in the Star Wars saga, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, is a solid series installment and a tad better follow-up to 2015’s modestly fun J.J. Abrams helmed Star Wars: The Force Awakens. That picture, with its feminist, Luke Skywalker…
Read MoreJames Franco’s The Disaster Artist is an unexpectedly near-great movie and one of the funniest pictures ever made about the process of making movies. In telling its loopy, endearing tale of ambition minus talent in Hollywood—of which there’s certainly no shortage—it manages to lampoon both…
Read MoreFrances McDormand gives an uncompromising performance in Martin McDonough’s blistering Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a corrosive battle cry of a movie that taps into dual rages—the primal pain of a parent mourning the death of a child and a rising antipathy against incompetent…
Read MoreOne of the very best movies of 2017, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird is quite possibly one of the smartest movies ever made about navigating the thorniness of high school, parents and young adulthood. It’s disarmingly funny—maybe funnier than any movie this year—and deeply observed in…
Read MoreIf you haven’t seen Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (or read the novel, for that matter), then Kenneth Branagh’s sometimes entertaining new film version may just win you over. It’s a movie with a fine ensemble and enough…
Read MoreThe new drama Thank You for Your Service is as powerfully written and acted an examination of the experience war veterans face upon returning home as the movies have seen in ages. It’s also an important one, which sounds perhaps hyperbolic, but it really…
Read MoreCruelty inflicted as much on the audience as its characters, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is an absurdist nightmare, a morality play lacking any trace of recognizable human behavior and a chore to experience once you realize that director Yorgos Lanthimos is playing…
Read MoreTodd Haynes’ new picture Wonderstruck, about a pair of deaf children in different time periods making pilgrimages to Manhattan, is a curious disappointment with little cumulative dramatic impact. It strives for magic, wonder and to transport us, but as a story it never delivers…
Read MoreGoodbye Christopher Robin: Director Simon Curtis on the Origin Story of a Writer, a Boy and a Teddy for the Ages

While many of us fondly recall Winne-the-Pooh as indelible nostalgia and a collection of some of the most enduring characters in all of children’s literature, far fewer are aware of the story’s bittersweet origins. In director Simon Curtis’ new picture, Goodbye Christopher Robin, an…
Read More