With features formed by a chisel and impeccably droll sophistication, Rupert Everett was, for a sustained run, a quintessential matinee idol whose visage thrust upon a forty-foot screen could remind one what movie stars could accomplish in their pictures, and us. A striking combination of…
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Felix von Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy takes a harrowing look at a family torn apart by meth addiction. Based on a true story—two of them, actually—and acted by a career high Steve Carell and a powerful Timothée Chalamet as father and son David and Nic…
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Prolific, Oscar-nominated producer Marc Turteltaub (Little Miss Sunshine, Safety Not Guaranteed, Loving) steps into the director’s chair to mount a quiet story of liberation in his first picture Puzzle, featuring a career high Kelly Macdonald as a subservient, suburban New York housewife and mother…
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Across four features, writer-director Shana Feste has displayed a compassion for her characters that defines her a distinctly humanist filmmaker, one who writes people she dearly cares for and then pushes them into difficult places. Whether parents grieving a son’s untimely death, a country and…
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Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade, the surprise of the commercial moviegoing year, is a sleeper of a picture that outpaces the season’s big Hollywood effects movies with ideas and craft and moderate scale, a cautionary sci-fi actioner about AI, vengeance and what we are losing in…
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At 72, Paul Schrader has crafted one of his finest pictures in First Reformed, the story of a bereft reverend, played by Ethan Hawke, who undergoes a dark night of the soul before perhaps—or not—achieving transcendence. One of the few great pictures this year…
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Book Club, director Bill Holderman’s sweet, funny new comedy about four lifelong friends unexpectedly liberated by Fifty Shades of Grey, says it’s never too late to rediscover yourself—and love. But the real story in this glossy, zippy movie starring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice…
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In his last three films—Gloria, A Fantastic Woman and now Disobedience—Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Lelio has explored the struggles of outsiders standing aside of established communities, mores and social constructs. In the process, he has also written a collection of indelible female characters who embrace…
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Based on the wildly successful 2012 novel about a disembodied soul that inhabits a new host each day only to fall in love—and want to settle down—with a smart, lonely high school girl, Every Day is, for a movie about teenagers, as ambitiously conceived…
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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…
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